[ale] gpg2 --gen-key requires password which it won't take or use

[Jim Kinney]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> Had you said "Have you tried rebooting" I'd have put you on a list for a
> pounding!
>
> :-)
>
> It's looking like the new gpg-agent crap that manages the passphrase
> process is just broken for a commandline only situation. It's supposed to
> popup a curses-based "now what?" environment but that doesn't work over an
> ssh connection. I can manually get an "OK. Your orders please" line out of
> pinentry but it seems gpg-agent can't find it _AND_ there is no conf file
> around to define it in.
>
> packaging error.
>
>
follow up:  It seems the failure is in the tty area. If I directly ssh to
the machine as the user needing to run the gpg command, it works as
designed. But as that user originally had no password access to login with
(it was a system account), I would do the su - root; su - <user> dance. But
that would reuse the same tty (/dev/pts/0) which is owned by the original
login user. --oops-- no can write to that! Logging into the console as root
then su - <user> would fail the same way.

Solution: add a password for the user, login directly, do the gpg thing, log
out. log in as me, su, prevent user login by replacing password hash in
/etc/shadow with !! .



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
I would rather stumble along in freedom than walk effortlessly in chains.
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