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milosgajdos
Asked: 2020-04-02 06:46:13 +0800 CST

SSH_AUTH_SOCK held by keyring

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I'm running RHEL with xfce 4.14 on one of the work VMs 

$ cat /etc/redhat-release 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.1 (Ootpa)
$ uname -a
Linux foo.local 4.18.0-147.el8.sf02480468.12.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Oct 25 18:17:10 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

At some point I noticed that the keyring seems to "hold" SSH_AUTHSOCK and that has an effect of my being able to do anything over ssh:

$ echo $SSH_AUTH_SOCK 
/run/user/1932626999/keyring/ssh
$ ls -l /run/user/1932626999/keyring/ssh
srwxr-xr-x. 1 mgajdos domain users 0 Apr  1 15:03 /run/user/1932626999/keyring/ssh
$

The way I noticed it is when I tried to push some code to a git remote over ssh, git basically just hung indefinitely. Obviously, the same behavior is also observed when attempting to connect to any remote ssh server.

If I unset the environment variable manually everything gets back to normal:

unset SSH_AUTH_SOCK

Does anyone know how to fix this, besides having the unset done in my shell profile or how do I get rid of this? I'm pretty puzzled bu this.

UPDATE: so it seems like it's gnome-keyring launching ssh-agent which then, in turn, holds the SSH_AUTH_SOCKET preventing any sort of ssh actions unless the said env variable is unset as shown above.

I'm thinking if disabling gnome-keyring might get this back to "normal".

linux redhat ssh

1 Answers

  1. It turns out, restarting the gnome-keyring does the job. It makes you reauthenticate and suddenly you can use the ssh client as normally.

    I'm not sure how the gnome-keyring locked me out of ssh as I could not find anything in the logs, but it did.

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