SSH helper workarounds

The SSH helper

When

• you don't have admin rights
• and, the native OpenSSH client is installed,
• and the native ssh-agent service is disabled

using the SSH helper is not straight forward and needs to be worked around.

Short version:

• scoop install openssh
• Add the scoop shims folder as the first $PATH item in your $Profile: $env:PATH=$HOME+"\scoop\shims;"+$env:PATH

Long version:

It is possible to install openssh with scoop install openssh as a normal user and start the ssh-agent as a background process. However ssh.exe, ssh-agent.exe, ssh-add.exe will be the ones of the native OpenSSH client. The is because user path PATH, which included the scoop openssh binaries is always appended to the systems PATH. The OpenSSH binaries are found first and used. To solve this issue you can add the following line to your $Profile. Which is in my case: $HOME/Documents/WindowsPowerShell/Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

$env:PATH=$HOME+"\scoop\shims;"+$env:PATH

You can check these registry keys for the system and the user paths:

• System: req query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment" /v path
• User: req query "HKCU\Environment" /v path