Locked out of my user account

[Am Elder]

Hello,

My rsa passphrase seems to be locking me out of one of the accounts on my notebook running Ubuntu Maverick.

I have an administrator account and an every-day account on this computer. In my 'desktop user' account, I recently created an rsa key in order to contribute to an open source project on GitHub. Following the directions on GitHub for generating SSH keys, and working with SSH key passphrases, I saved the key to /home/username/.ssh. This is not the first time I created an rsa key on this account. On my first reboot, a second log-in dialog popped up after I entered my account password, asking for my rsa passphrase. However, it does not accept the passphrase I give it. Instead, it returns me to the log-in screen. So, I cannot log in to my main day-to-day account on this computer.

I spent time learning the passphrase when I created it and even wrote it down for safety, intending to destroy it after using it successfully a few more times, so I'm fairly sure I'm entering the passphrase I created for the key.

Some packages installed on this computer: gnome-keyring, libgnome-keyring0, libpam-gnome-keyring, openssh-client.

The last time I created an rsa key for github, I did not encounter this passphrase dialog. Why am I shut out of this account, and what can I do to gain access to it again?

I would really appreciate any help.

[cariboo]

Probably the easiest way to to solve the problem is to log in as root:

sudo -i

then remove /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa and id_rsa.pub, and start over.

[Am Elder]

Thank you cariboo907. That didn't fix the problem: after moving the key pair, I still can't log in. However, root access let me troubleshoot a bit. I still need help though.

I've looked in .xsession-errors, and found the following error:

/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
/home/daily/.profile: 29: function: not found
Initializing new SSH agent...
succeeded
Identity added: /home/daily/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/daily/.ssh/id_rsa)
/home/daily/.profile: 37: Syntax error: "}" unexpected

The relevant portion of my .profile is:

28.  # start the ssh-agent
29.   function start_agent {
30.      echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
31.      # spawn ssh-agent
32.      ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "$SSH_ENV"
33.      echo succeeded
34.      chmod 600 "$SSH_ENV"
35.      . "$SSH_ENV" > /dev/null
36.      ssh-add
37.  }

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess something is happening like: the shell isn't recognizing the function declaration, it's not reading the rest of line 29, and so not recognizing the closing bracket.

But how do I fix it?

[edit]I tried commenting out lines 29 and 37 of .profile, and that didn't work.[/edit]

[Am Elder]

Commenting out another function declaration further down as well, allowed me to log into my account. I'm marking this as solved, because I'm in now. But there are a whole host of new xsession errors that have popped up. I'm going to the #ubuntu irc channel for help.