strange ssh issues with github

Question

Scenario 1. I am doing this from /home/deploy directory

I am trying to set up ssh with github for capistrano deployment. this has been an absolute nightmare.

when I do ssh [email protected] as the deploy account I get

Permission denied (publickey).

so may be the key is not being found, so If I do a

ssh-add /home/deploy/.ssh/id_rsa

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

(i did verify that the ssh-agent was running) If I do exec ssh-agent bash and then repeat the ssh-add then the key does get added and I can ssh into github.

Now I exit from the ssh connection to my server and ssh back in and I can't ssh into github anymore!

Scenario 2

if I login to my remote server and then cd into my .ssh directory and ssh into github then it all works fine

I guess there is a problem with locating the key and for some reason the agent isn't funcitoning correctly.

Any ideas?

Here is a pastie with more details..

http://pastie.org/pastes/1190557/