Error communicating with gnome-keyring-daemon

[aviramof]

Binary package hint: seahorse

i have a problem for some time now that when i open empathy it asks me to enter my accounts again and when i go and check at seahorse i see this message in the bottom of the windows.

when i recently installed Ubuntu RC i set password for my key ring but later i set it as unsafe storage because empathy keep asking me for password when i opened it because when i installed Ubuntu i set auto login and not the default option.

the reason i did that is because i'm the sole user of this computer the question is what exactly is causing the problem is it the unsafe storage that is buggy or is it something else that is causing the problem that seahorse is showing?

When i try to create a new password i also get this error "Error communicating with gnome-keyring-daemon"

the problem usually fix itself after restart but returns again later.

What ever information you need just tell and thanks in advance.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: seahorse 2.30.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Apr 25 10:33:24 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Release Candidate i386 (20100419)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=he_IL.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: seahorse

[aviramof (aviramof)]

The only way i know to reproduce this problem is by restarting Ubuntu because one time is working fine and the other is not it as simple as this.

[aviramof (aviramof)]

When i check now I'm starting to think it's more users-admin problem and not seahorse in users-admin there is an option "asked on login" and "don't asked on login" i think if i use the letter this cause the problem i mentioned i think so because i just logged of
and logged on with this option on and i still had this problem but when i disabled it and changed it back to "asked on login" the
problem is solved so please fix it to work well no matter what option is on and thanks in advance.

[christopher pijarski (kpijarski)]

The same problem here, but I think this is a wider problem, too - the RC (specifically speaking - the updates after RC) really rendered my computer useless:
1. I have to enter all the passwords for everything all over again (I get the communication with keyring error)
2. neither nm-applet nor gnome-power-manager start with the session (yes, they are in the session startup items), I have to start them manually later
3. the whole admistrative access scheme seems not to work : I can't add any new users (the system won't bring up the unlock/authorization dialog so nothing happens), I can't add any hardware drivers (the system tells me I don't have the permissions, unless I start jockey with gksudo, but I shouldn't be supposed to!)
4. the nvidia driver doesn't work any more (I don't know in what way that has to do with the rest but all the above symptoms appeared at the same time)
In sum, my system is suddenly half useless and a big hassle to work with; I know it is RC still but 4 days before release this seems to be a major regression!

Just to make sure it was not my specific configuration/upgrade that was the cause I re-installed RC from scratch and always ended up with the above. Any help would be very much appreciated, Thanks!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

[aviramof (aviramof)]

This site is a mess i have an account there and i can't log in i ever restored the password twice and i still can't log in so it want be me i guess.

[aviramof (aviramof)]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/post_bug.cgi

[aviramof (aviramof)]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=616861

[christopher pijarski (kpijarski)]

I am sorry fo the post above - it turned out to be a problem with my home folder - I reinstalled again yesterday and transferred only the crucial folders and setting one by one; now everything is working like a charm. The fact remains though that this happened after an update, I have no idea why.
Keyring working again as it should.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for sending the bug to GNOME

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

We need more information upstream. Reporting the bug there is one thing, but making the report clear is another. There's no point in making a copy/paste of the symptoms reported in Launchpad: upstream needs something detailed enough. Would somebody that understands the causes of the problem explain them to upstream? Thanks!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

ok, let's close the bug then, you might want to close the GNOME one too

[aviramof (aviramof)]

is there any more information i can provide from my ubuntu machine?

[Michal (michal-ciza)]

I had the same problem and found following solution:

1. Go to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applicataions

2. Find Item: "Certificate and Key Storage" and edit it

3. Change command to: "gnome-keyring-daemon" and save it.

4. Reboot

NOTE: After upgrade from 9.10, there was following command: "gnome-keyring-daemon --start --components=pkcs11" which caused some error message. After the change mentioned above, it started working properly.

[aviramof (aviramof)]

I discovered that if don't disable the need to enter password when you log off then everything is ok but your solution is also a good one.:)

[Erik Meitner (e.meitner)]

This problem is related to a user being password-less(as set in "Users and Groups"). On a newly installed 10.04 system I had to disable password-less mode to get Seahorse to be able to connect to the gnome-keyring-daemon.

@Michal: "gnome-keyring-daemon --start --components=pkcs11" is the default for 10.04 so I think this is not related to an upgrade.

[aviramof (aviramof)]

The user is not password-less the user have a password i only chosed auto login during the install process via ubiquity and the it something that you can also change via login screen option in system-administrative or preference i don't remember right now but the problem for me at least don't exist until i try to disable the need for password if i log off and then log on in "Users and Groups" and no it has nothing to do with upgrade because i never upgraded from any version to 10.04 i always installed clean 10.04 cd version or dvd version.

In any case in the mean time i don't use any linux version i'm waiting for 10.04.1 before i try it again.

[Forest (foresto)]

I recently upgraded from Xubuntu Karmic to Lucid, and ran into the same error: both nm-applet and seahorse were failing to contact gnome-keyring-daemon. After a lot of investigation, I'm starting to think I know what's going on:

- Seahorse, nm-applet, and probably a lot of other components contact gnome-keyring-daemon through libgnome-keyring0.

- (I'm guessing on this one.) Recent versions of libgnome-keyring0 seem to have begun looking for gnome-keyring-daemon exclusively via dbus, ignoring environment variables like GNOME_KEYRING_CONTROL and GNOME_KEYRING_PID.

- gnome-keyring-daemon was unable to publish itself via dbus, because it was initialized (run with the --start option) in ~/.xprofile, which gets run before dbus has started.

- I had configured my system to initialize it in ~/.xprofile in order to capture and export the environment variables that it prints, which are necessary for features like ssh agent.
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/Ssh
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/RunningDaemon

- The environment variables weren't getting captured and exported because someone patched the ubuntu xfce-session package to disable that functionality, in a misguided attempt to fix another problem. See bug 357346. (On Xfce, the environment variables are not automatically exported to the session environment, because Xfce's session manager doesn't implement the environment variable setting mechanism that GNOME's session manager does. Therefore, capturing the printed environment variables is the only way to make sure they get set.)

I suggest the original bug reporter try to figure out where gnome-keyring-daemon is being started, and whether there are multiple copies of it running. If it gets run with the --start option before dbus is running, even if it is later run again (perhaps with --components=pkcs11), every program that uses libgnome-keyring0 may be unable to reach it. If you don't need support for older client programs or the SSH agent feature, or if you're running GNOME and not Xfce, you can probably safely remove whatever is launching it early and let the *.desktop scripts in /etc/xdg/autostart handle it instead.

[Allan Pratt (apratt-)]

Upstream, the GNOME bug 616861 has very little data and no triage or assignment, certainly nothing like Forest's excellent analysis that appears here comment 18 and in bug 357346, plus whatever notes he has put in the bugs linked to from there.

This seems insane. Would it get more attention to say it like this? "If you enable auto-login, reboots won't auto-connect to secure wireless." That's a primary symptom of this tangled chain of events. Meanwhile every affected Lucid user has to search the web and find the workaround in comment 14. (Or, you know, not.)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

You comment on a closed bug, you should rather open a new one if you want people to read your comments. If a password is requires it's normal it's asking for one on login since it can't guess it for you or the storage would be unsecure...

[Allan Pratt (apratt-)]

I'm not sure I'm reading this bug system's UI properly, but it looks like this is still open ("New" not "Invalid") as regards the "GNOME keyring" subsystem, and that's where the upstream bug is being tracked. This bug is closed ("Invalid") with respect to the subsystem "gnome-keyring (ubuntu)" but it's been in that state since April and people have continued to comment on it - most especially Forest adding his excellent analysis.

It is the upstream bug that I think could usefully be updated with more information to help it get attention. I can't do it properly myself, because I don't have a first-hand analysis of the chain of events that causes the symptoms, the way Forest does.

As for the concern that key storage would be insecure: Enabling auto-login generally means "Anybody who turns this computer on can see my private stuff." I should not be prohibited from making that tradeoff between security and convenience, certainly not by a cascade of bugs and flawed bug-fixing decisions.

In any case, I found an alternate workaround for my problem: remove network-manager and network-manager-gnome, and install the network management package "wicd" instead. After you use "wicd-curses" to configure the wireless network, you can both auto-logon and auto-connect to wireless. This doesn't help with "empathy" but that's not the issue that brought me here.

[aviramof (aviramof)]

I'm currently using maverick and here i use auto login at boot but did not disabled the login windows after log off i would it a try and see if the bug with empathy and the keyring still exist here and if not then maybe this bug report could be close as long as
it doesn't happen to anyone eles.

[aviramof (aviramof)]

Problem still exist i just tried and got the same message at the bottom of seashore "can't communicating with gnome-keyring-daemon" or "Error communicating with gnome-keyring-daemon" i'm translating it from Hebrew so it might not be accurate.

And also empathy doesn't work well at all there are no accounts there and when i try to import from pidgin it shows me no accounts but pidgin itself is still working fine meaning that empathy depends on this keyring and seashore and that is why
i don't use it because i hope that one day this bug would be fixed so that i could use empathy without worrying about the keyring.