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Password hell: gdm, ssh and gnome-keyring

Tuesday, August 22, 2006 ★ 09:44 ★ Categories Gnome, Linux

When I log into my laptop machine by entering my username and password into GDM, After logging in, I often find myself opening two of my SSH keys:

one key is used to login to some remote hosts, eg. the machine I host my mail on;

the other key is for my Gnome CVS account. I’m using a separate key for this service, so that I can use it on other machines without sharing my normal per-machine (laptop) key.
However, this causes me to enter my password at least three times! When I’m at home and my laptop tries to connect to my access point (long live network-manager) I also need to unlock my Gnome keyring, so that the total amount of passwords needed to get my machine running is four.

Luckily, there’s a solution for the ssh keys: libpam-ssh (simply apt-get install libpam-ssh on a Debian box). You need to add two lines (the ones containing pam-ssh) to /etc/pam.d/gdm, one after common-auth and one after common-session. First one:
```
@include common-auth
@include pam-ssh-auth
```
Second:
```
@include common-session
@include pam-ssh-session
```
Make sure you use the same password to unlock your ssh keys as you use to login to your machine. By default, ~/.ssh/id_dsa, ~/.ssh/id_rsa, and some other files are used. I simply symlinked my ~/.ssh/id-rsa-gnome file to ~/.ssh/id_dsa to load both keys, without fiddling with system-wide configuration files.

Now I only have to enter two passwords on login. Victory! Well, almost… does anyone have a solution for gnome-keyring (except for password-less keyrings, which are not option for laptops)?

Update: I’ve posted an update on this article.

Random photo from Turkey (May, 2005)

Who wrote all this?

Wouter Bolsterlee, also known as uws, a postmodern geek living in the Netherlands. Read more about me…

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