Setting up keychain for bash on a linux server

I have managed to do much messing around with linux recently:

• Setting up an Ubuntu Server VM in Windows 8 Hyper-V
• Setting up aliases in bash

I’m a big fan of using ssh keys, and have powershell setup to request my password once. However on the linux server I had the following in my .profile:

if [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ] ; then
    eval `ssh-agent -s`
    ssh-add
fi

Which is fine, but it starts an ssh-agent instance for every log-in. And this means that I’m prompted for the password everytime I log in.

One answer I’ve seen frequently is to use keychain, and I have installed it in the past:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install keychain

But, I failed (yes, I know, I suck…) and couldn’t get it to work… But today I finally invested some proper time into understanding ssh-agent, keychain and bash. Thanks to ZIADI Mohamed ali’s answer on serverfault I’ve now got it working nicely. In my .profile I now have this line:

eval `keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa --eval`

And I’m only asked for the password once. Job’s a good ‘un!