Ubuntu 11.04 Doesn't Accept Keyring Password On First Try

[fragos]

I've been fighting this for a long time. This all started for me at the same time I started using Ubuntuone, empathy and gwibber. For IM I also had Gmail and I started to use Tweetdeck for Twitter. So I uninstalled gwibber and empathy and it went back to one login for a while. Next I found that a login.keyring kept being created. As I've said before changing my default keyring to login and deleting my old default passwords.kingring brought me down to one login again. But low and behold now I occasionally have three logins but mostly only one. Very bizarre. I believe the steps I've taken having impacted the problem in a positive direction but the root cause may still exist. On my laptop, also running 11.04, I've never used Ubuntuone, empathy or gwibber. There I've no keyring logins what so ever.

[sgreene59]

Same here, this is highly annoying. How was Natty released like this? How is this not fixed already? I don't use Uone, Facebook or Twitter. I should only have passwords for Evolution and my wireless keys stored. I have 4 different Ubuntu systems at home and all are effected.

[alienmindtrick]

To keep from having more than one login prompt, I changed my login preferences at System > Administration > Login Screen (I'm using Gnome3 vice Unity...which I call Untidy) such that I now have to login at startup (sigh). Oh well. As inelegant as it is, it's better than having 3 or more pop up.

Just keep in mind that this minor inconvenience aside, Ubuntu is still better than Mac or *******. Sometimes I get frustrated and lose sight of that, but I never forget the big picture in the end.

[evan54]

Hi all,

so I've been fighting with this issue since I set up 11.04 this week and finally today think I understood enough to fix it.

So in the folder:

~/.gnome2/keyrings/

all the settings are stored, so any time things screw up / you forget passwords this that and the other you can just delete everything in that folder and on the next log on you will simply be asked to enter a new keyring and you 'll have to set up everything again related to them. (Wireless, empathy, UbuntuOne for me).

Provided you enter a password to log in it should be fairly simple to get this working.
In the aforementioned directory there should be at least two files:

- login.keyring
- user.keystore

and potentially:

- default

all text files.

If you have a keyring that is not blank then "login.keyring" is encrypted and information in it protected.

No idea what user.keystore does and to be honest didn't have to deal with it once.. also is encrytped.

The "default" text file holds the value of the default keyring, which should be set to "login". This is done by opening "default" with any text editor and entering "login" as it's only content, saving and closing.

Now, the idea is that the login.keyring should be encrypted using the same key as your login password. Ie that when you are prompted to enter a keyring password enter the same password as when you login. Also, this can be later changed from the system > Preferences > Passwords and Encryption keys right click etc menus.

To summarise, you need to have:

- login.keyring and the password for it (also called key) to be the same as your log on password.
- user.keystore should appear automatically
- default if it exists it should have "login" as its content.

If you set up your computer to automatically log on it is a huuge pain in the but since the keyring doesn't get automatically unlocked and you will have to enter the keyring however many number of times it is required unless you have a blank password for the keyring. (in which case if you open the ~/.gnome2/keyrings/<name>.keyring file everything is readily available... generally a bad idea

Hope this was helpful and not too long.

[eMJayy]

Thanks Evan54

I started having this issue a day ago after being forced to do a hard reset due to a failed piece of hardware. You had the key bit of info that I was looking for to solve this problem - the location of the config files associated with the keyrings. The other stuff I already knew, but I suspected from the beginning that doing the keyring deletions without also deleting the config files won't fix the problem. The problem was that I didn't know where to find those particular config files.

Apparently, when I did the hard reset, some of these config files got messed up. A little experiment I did earlier showed that deleting the keyrings in the Passwords and Keyrings window didn't delete the config files in .gnome2/keyrings.

Basically what I did to solve the problem was this -

1. Delete all the keys in the Passwords and Keyrings window. (Normally, there should only be one password:login key in there, but once the problem began, multiple login keys were suddenly being created and being marked as default every time I rebooted)

2. Delete all the files found in ~/.gnome2/keyrings/ as Evan54 suggested. This is very important, because failure to do so is the reason why just deleting the keys in the Passwords and Keyrings window fails to fix the issue.

3. Restart the machine

My machine is configured to manual login. Once logged in, I got a prompt asking for the password to my wireless network. No other login prompts appeared. I then reactivated my accounts in Gwibber (each account stores separate login info in the keyring and is the reason why the unlock prompt may appear up to 3 or 4 times in a row at startup) and logged into my UbuntuOne account. Everything logged in automatically on restart for the first time since the problem started, confirming that the problem has been fixed. Thanks again!

[fragos]

Thanks Evan54

I started having this issue a day ago after being forced to do a hard reset due to a failed piece of hardware. You had the key bit of info that I was looking for to solve this problem - the location of the config files associated with the keyrings. The other stuff I already knew, but I suspected from the beginning that doing the keyring deletions without also deleting the config files won't fix the problem. The problem was that I didn't know where to find those particular config files.

Apparently, when I did the hard reset, some of these config files got messed up. A little experiment I did earlier showed that deleting the keyrings in the Passwords and Keyrings window didn't delete the config files in .gnome2/keyrings.

Basically what I did to solve the problem was this -

1. Delete all the keys in the Passwords and Keyrings window. (Normally, there should only be one password:login key in there, but once the problem began, multiple login keys were suddenly being created and being marked as default every time I rebooted)

2. Delete all the files found in ~/.gnome2/keyrings/ as Evan54 suggested. This is very important, because failure to do so is the reason why just deleting the keys in the Passwords and Keyrings window fails to fix the issue.

3. Restart the machine

My machine is configured to manual login. Once logged in, I got a prompt asking for the password to my wireless network. No other login prompts appeared. I then reactivated my accounts in Gwibber (each account stores separate login info in the keyring and is the reason why the unlock prompt may appear up to 3 or 4 times in a row at startup) and logged into my UbuntuOne account. Everything logged in automatically on restart for the first time since the problem started, confirming that the problem has been fixed. Thanks again!

the config files are in ~/.gnome2/keyrings