Windows 1903 PowerShell OpenSSH Error 1058

The Problem

After a smooth feature update from Windows 10 1809 to 1903 on my Surface Laptop and my desktop PC, I started up my development environment on both, because I’ve had some surprises before after such updates.

On the Surface Laptop, I started Cmder, which spawned the usual PowerShell terminal, then a few seconds later, I was presented by this sequence of messages:

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unable to start ssh-agent service, error :1058
Error connecting to agent: No such file or directory
Error connecting to agent: No such file or directory
Loading personal and system profiles took 1435ms.

My PowerShell Profile, among various other things particular to my environment, checks for and loads my private SSH key, which involves starting the ssh-agent service.

As it turned out, somewhere during the update, Windows had “helpfully” set the start type of ssh-agent to Disabled - as I discovered:

Get-Service ssh-agent | Select-Object StartType


StartType
---------
 Disabled

How I Fixed It

The fix was implicit in the problem - I simply changed the startup type of ssh-agent to Automatic:

Set-Service ssh-agent -StartupType Automatic

Then started the service:

Start-Service ssh-agent

And reloaded Cmder, seeing the rather more encouraging (and familiar) messages below (edited for privacy):

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Identity added: C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_rsa (C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_rsa)
Loading personal and system profiles took 1353ms.

(Admin) : user@hostname : C:\folder\subfolder : 23/05/2019 17:17:10 :
>

But Wait

This was all well and good, but why was the problem not also occuring on my desktop PC?

First, I confirmed that the ssh-agent startup type somehow escaped the “Disable-Hammer” of the feature update…

Get-Service ssh-agent | Select-Object StartType
Get-Service : Cannot find any service with service name 'ssh-agent'.
At line:1 char:1
+ Get-Service ssh-agent | Select-Object StartType
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (ssh-agent:String) [Get-Service], ServiceCommandException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NoServiceFoundForGivenName,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetServiceCommand

Well, that came as a surprise.

Better check the install status of the OpenSSH Client Optional App…

Get-WindowsCapability -Online -Name *openssh.client*


Name         : OpenSSH.Client~~~~0.0.1.0
State        : NotPresent
DisplayName  : OpenSSH Client
Description  : OpenSSH-based secure shell (SSH) client, for secure key management and access to remote machines.
DownloadSize : 1316207
InstallSize  : 5300763

This shook loose some dust from my memory. As I recall, at some point I got annoyed with having to manage the ssh-agent service every time a Windows feature update occurred, so I uninstalled it from my desktop PC.

So I removed the OpenSSH Client Optional App from my Surface Laptop:

$capability = Get-WindowsCapability -Online -Name *openssh.client*
Remove-WindowsCapability -Name $capability.name -Online

Path          :
Online        : True
RestartNeeded : True

Restart-Computer

After the Surface came back online, I opened Cmder and waited for a whole bunch of unexpected errors:

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Identity added: /c/Users/username/.ssh/id_rsa (/c/Users/username/.ssh/id_rsa)
Loading personal and system profiles took 4305ms.

(Admin) : user@hostname : C:\folder\subfolder : 23/05/2019 17:36:06 :

But didn’t get any - so I called this a win and I look forward to not having to apply the above fix again in future!