gpg-agent not running when needed by Déjà Dup

[James Budarz]

Some have reported problems before with repeated demands for encryption passwords, but mine gives a different error. I've deleted all my previous backups and reinstalled duplicity and deja-dup, but I still get the error:

DUPLICITY: . ===== Begin GnuPG log =====
DUPLICITY: . gpg: WARNING: "--no-use-agent" is an obsolete option - it has no effect
DUPLICITY: . gpg: invalid size of lockfile '/home/username/.gnupg/gnupg_spawn_agent_sentinel.lock'
DUPLICITY: . gpg: cannot read lockfile
DUPLICITY: . gpg: can't connect to the agent: Invalid argument
DUPLICITY: . gpg: problem with the agent: No agent running
DUPLICITY: . ===== End GnuPG log =====
DUPLICITY: .
DUPLICITY: .

DUPLICITY: ERROR 31 GPGError
DUPLICITY: . GPGError: GPG Failed, see log below:
DUPLICITY: . ===== Begin GnuPG log =====
DUPLICITY: . gpg: WARNING: "--no-use-agent" is an obsolete option - it has no effect
DUPLICITY: . gpg: invalid size of lockfile '/home/username/.gnupg/gnupg_spawn_agent_sentinel.lock'
DUPLICITY: . gpg: cannot read lockfile
DUPLICITY: . gpg: can't connect to the agent: Invalid argument
DUPLICITY: . gpg: problem with the agent: No agent running
DUPLICITY: . ===== End GnuPG log =====
DUPLICITY: .

System details:
Ubuntu 17.04
deja-dup 34.4-0ubuntu1
duplicity 0.7.06-2ubuntu3

Thank you in advance!

[Vej (vej)]

Hello James,

this problem might be related to your current installation of GPG.

So could you please give columns "Name" and "Version" from the output of "dpkg --list gpg*"?

[James Budarz (jimbudarz)]

||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
un gpg <none> <none> (no description available)
un gpg-agent <none> <none> (no description available)
un gpgsm <none> <none> (no description available)
ii gpgv 2.1.15-1ubun amd64 GNU privacy guard - signature ver
un gpgv1 <none> <none> (no description available)
un gpgv2 <none> <none> (no description available)

Thanks again.

[Vej (vej)]

Hallo James.

Thanks for that output. There should be a background process running called gpg-agent.

Can you please check that using the command "ps x | grep gpg".

This should give you up to 3 lines of output.

The question is, if there is one including "gpg-agent --homedir /some/path/.gnupg --use-standard-socket --daemon". /some/path should be a path inside of the home directory of your user.

Best

Vej

[James Budarz (jimbudarz)]

Hmm, no, my only output there is

24591 pts/1 S+ 0:00 grep --color=auto gpg

Thanks for following up.

[Vej (vej)]

Hello James,

that is interesting. It means, that your gpg-agent is not running.

So lets try to start it from a terminal and see if this gets Deja-Dup to work (please post every output of that command here for analysis – anonymised if needs be) :

     gpg-agent --daemon

If that does not throw an error message, please execute a verbose backup and provide us with the file /tmp/deja-dup.log

    DEJA_DUP_DEBUG=1 deja-dup --backup | tail -n 1000 > /tmp/deja-dup.log

Best Regards

Vej

[James Budarz (jimbudarz)]

The backup completed successfully once I manually started gpg-agent. I'm not sure if this is meant to be triggered by deja-dup. If so it remains a bug, otherwise I can close it and launch the daemon manually at boot.

Thanks for the help!

[Vej (vej)]

Hello James,

this should not be triggered by Déjà Dup, but by a combination of a file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent together with an entry "use-agent" inside of ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf.

Can you check, if the file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent does exist at your system and if your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf does include use-agent please?

I will move this bug report over to the Downstream Triagers of the ubuntu package gnupg-agent, which may ask more questions about this.

[James Budarz (jimbudarz)]

Thanks for everything, Vej.
To answer your questions, /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent does exist on my system and use-agent is enabled in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf.

[Tobias Barden (tobias+b)]

Hello Vej,

I'm also affected from this bug.

System details:
Ubuntu 17.10
deja-dup 36.2-0ubuntu1
duplicity 0.7.12
gpgv 2.1.15-1ubuntu8

Same problem: gpg-agent was not running
But: ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf does not contain a use-agent statement (everything is commented out). As I was not able to find any reference on how the default gpg.conf file should look like, I'm note sure if this is supposed to or not.

Same solution: starting the agent manually solves the problem.

Kind regards

[Josef Möllers (jmoellers)]

'morning,
I'm also affected, I'm not sure since when as I only occasionally receive encrypted emails.

Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS
gpgv 1.4.20-1ubuntu3.3
gnupg-agent 2.1.11-6ubuntu2.1

1) use-agent is active in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf
2) gpg-agent fails to start due to a missing /run/usr/$UID/gnupg directory (/run/usr/$UID exists)
3) After repair ("mkdir /run/usr/$UID/gnupg"), gpg-agent starts automagically with these arguments: --homedir /home/josef/.gnupg --use-standard-socket --daemon, but still the socket is create in /run/user/UID/gnupg!
4) /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent exists
5) I use KDE (kde-baseapps-bin 4:15.12.3-0ubuntu1, though other KDE packages are 4:5.5.5-0ubuntu1).