Thursday, June 7, 2012

Gnome Keyring: Location

Gnome keyring can automatically unlock passwords stored in the keyring. Gnome keyring include the following components: pkcs11, gpg, secrets, ssh. You can take a look at various passwords and keys stored by running (Alt + F2) seahorse.
Various keyrings are unlocked during user login. You can control which one by reviewing gnome startup application preferences, take a look by running gnome-session-properties.
The problem I faced with was related to the fact that keyring daemon place it runtime data into $HOME/.cache/keyring-* directory and over time there are quite a lot of them there. So while these data are session specific I would think it is most appropriate to store this information somewhere in temporary storage (e.g. /tmp) so it cleaned up. Fortunately you can define environment variable $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR that points to /tmp and that get it solved.
echo "export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp" > \
    /etc/profile.d/gnome-keyring.sh
The keyring daemon properly manage file permission so it owned and readable by user only. Once you reboot your computer the system level profile will setup environment variable for you so keyring cache will be created out there.

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