Helpful readings to clarify issues? ssh/gpg agent in login shell vs XFCE terminal

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure if my question relates to a FreeBSD-ism or not so I put it here. Over the last few years I often noticed that
gpg-agent and ssh-agent do not work when directly using them after login. However, after startx I'm in my desktop environment and everything works flawlessly. Then I noticed that some of my servers only accept my SSH publickey connection attempt when my keys have been ssh-added while directly entering the password without the agent sometimes seems to cause the connection attempt to be rejected. But on the other hand, when I use an outdated ssh-dss key I need for iLO3, the opposite applies and using the agent will lead to a failed connection attempt. Similar behaviour for gpg-agent, it doesn't work directly after logging in but it does work after startx. The relevant environment variables always seem to have appropropriate contents.

I would like to know more about the dynamics behind these different behaviours. I tried to have more or less equal .shrc,.bashrc,
.profile and .login files. I'm sure this has something to do with environment variables but if someone asked me I could not say why server XYZ loves ssh-agent while old iLO3 seems to hate it.

Can anyone point me to where I find answers to my questions or if the answer is trivial just say what is going on?

Thanks
 
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