Properly use gnome-keyring-daemon Enlightenment (E-17) with ssh-agent support

Now enlightenment (E-17) become my favorite  window manager because it looks elegant and have the most sane automatic tiling action that do not require you to remember lots of keyboard short-cut. However, I got tire on inputting passcode of ssh keys over and over again.

After some searching,  articles like https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enlightenment#Gnome_Keyring_integration and http://kill-0.com/duplo/2010/01/27/e17-and-the-gnome-keyring-daemon/ suggest that following code block in ~/.profile do the trick:

if [ -n "$GNOME_KEYRING_PID" ]; then
    eval $(gnome-keyring-daemon --start)
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
    export GNOME_KEYRING_CONTROL
    export GPG_AGENT_INFO
fi

After apply it, it did work, typing

ssh-add -L

returns all my keys, but I cannot use any network that manual password typing, the network manager applet shows “User authentication is required”, but the god-damn password dialog just not showing. Other than actually switch network, there is a command, seahorse,  can be used to spot this symptom. Just run

seahorse

enable View->By keyring, and look at upper left. If it does not have section “Password” or “Login”, then you are bitten by this bug.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I use lightdm as Display manager. In order to make the gnome-keyring work with it, /etc/pam.d/lightdm should look like:

auth [success=done ignore=ignore default=bad] pam_selinux_permit.so
...
auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so 
auth include postlogin 
...
session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start 
session include postlogin

And if you need autologin, you need to do something similar to /etc/pam.d/lightdm-autologin

After some digging with journalctl  and systemd-loginctl, I found that .profile actually sourced twice, first is by /usr/bin/enlightenment_start (or lightdm), that one does not have ssh-agent associate with it, so calling gnome-keyring-daemon –start on that time let you neither be able to use network password dialog, nor the ssh keys are imported.

The second time is by /usr/bin/ssh-agent /bin/sh -c exec -l /bin/zsh -c “/usr/bin/enlightenment_start”,  you can safely call gnome-keyring-daemon now, as ssh-agent is now on.

So my ~/.profile ends like

if [ -n "$DESKTOP_SESSION" ];then 
    # No point to start gnome-keyring-daemon if ssh-agent is not up 
    if [ -n "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ];then 
        eval $(gnome-keyring-daemon --start) 
        export SSH_AUTH_SOCK export GPG_AGENT_INFO
        export GNOME_KEYRING_CONTROL
    fi
fi

One more thing, if you are using bash and has ~/.bash-profile, better to put above in to ~/.bash-profile.

zsh is similar, use ~/.zprofile instead.

Now be enlighten by enlightenment.

A software may pass the UAT, yet nobody want to use it

I recently encountered an interested case: we are asked to evaluate a system through user acceptance testing (UAT). I looked at the testing, it is essentially a set of functional tests.

I wonder what’s the difference between functional tests and UAT, and dig out the following link.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3370334/difference-between-acceptance-test-and-functional-test/8205070#8205070

According most posts on that thread, the differences between UAT and functional testing are just focus and scope, that is, if functional testing is performed by users for the sake of user, then it’s UAT.

While there is nothing wrong for functional testing including in UAT, however, if UAT only contains functional testing, it is possible that users tick all the box, but still avoid to use the system. For example, if the system requires a complex authentication mechanism to login, while with alternative you don’t have to. Even the system does everything else correctly it was designed, you would most likely to use the alternatives instead of the system.

So stop wondering why your system pass UAT but people deflect to alternatives. Please at lease asks following:

1. Do you need to use this system?
2. Do you enjoy using this system? If not, why?

If you feel like it, you may even ask

3. Will you use this system.

You may get interesting results combining the answers of all there question.