If Cygwin ssh, git, etc. can't find your .ssh directory

[Thomas Wolff]

Am 24.04.2020 um 15:46 schrieb Mark Hansen:
> I had a case when I took my office laptop home and found that in the 
> Cygwin environment,
> commands were not able to find my .ssh directory. It seemed those 
> commands didn't know
> where my home directory was, and was defaulting to "/".
>
> After asking on the Cygwin newsgroups, I received the following comment:
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I also have had to deal with this problem. You should certainly read
> https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html.
>
> After much experimenting and consultation with Corinna, we decided the
> best solution for me was:
>
>   * Create /etc/passwd and /etc/group files
>       o For /etc/passwd, I included just my account, and I actually
>         editted it further to use my preferred username (rather than my
>         domain username) and my correct home directory
>   * Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf with:
>       o passwd: files
>       o group: files
>
> This is not the generally recommended configuration, but in the
> situation where you cannot reach the domain server, it may be the best
> alternative. You may or may not need to back these changes out when you
> are back at work. I have not had a problem at work, but we are only
> loosely connected to the domain, so YMMV.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> After making the changes, I rebooted the machine and now it seems to 
> work.
>
> Note that when using the PC from home, I also had to set the HOME 
> environment
> variable in the environment variable settings.
> Sorry, this was a mistaken post. If an admin can do so, please delete 
> it. Thanks.
Not sure why you consider this mistaken. I'm not sure whether it's 
related but occasionally I also have a problem with ssh not finding 
.ssh. It's caused by ssh looking for ~/.ssh while my config dir is in 
$HOME/.ssh. These are generally assumed to be the same, but sometimes I 
observe the idea of bash what ~ means to get broken, without noticeable 
pattern so fare. It then points to /home/$USER while I've configured may 
HOME on one machine to be somewhere else. Weird...