Ubuntu – How to completely reset/erase the keyring

keyrings

Something happened to my keyring, I think chrome asked for a new password to create a new keyring and erased the old one, but now the process repeats. I save a few passwords and then it resets it again.

How do I completely swipe/remove/erase the keyring, so that this problem stops?

Best Answer

Open ~/.gnome2/keyrings/, remove all the files there that end with .keyring.

Next time keyring shows up for any reason do not enter a password for it and verify that you want to use unsafe storage. Keyring will still save your passwords and will not ask you again for a password.

Another option is to disable keyring so the deamon does not run but then you wont have keyring saving your passwords for you common programs.

Wifi Passwords

So as a partial solution I can confirm that migration of network manager passwords for wifi connections was successful. The procedure for network-manager passwords is:

Stop network-manager:
```
sudo service network-manager stop
```

Copy the necessary files in /etc/NetworkManager/ with:

sudo cp -r /BACKUPDESTINATION/etc/NetworkManager/{system-connections/,VPN} /etc/

Restart network-manager:
```
sudo service network-manager start
```

And you're done. I still haven't figured out how to copy passwords in the keyring (for ssh, gpg and remote-filesystems). It drives me mad!

Migrate keys and passwords

Finally I know, what was wrong. First of all the keys moved from the old ~/.gnome2/keyrings to the new ~/.local/share/keyrings. Probably due to the switch from Gnome to Unity. Also there seem to be additional files there, aside from the usual login.keyring and user.keystore. At least there where for me after a fresh install. Those hinder migration and I had to delete them.

As mentioned both user ID and user password on my new system matched their counterparts on the old system. If for you they don't, it might probably work to set the password on your old installation to blank (i.e. change your password to no password / empty password). Do that prior to backing up your old system.

Now here is what I did:

Backup the keyfile of the fresh installation in case something goes wrong:
```
mv ~/.local/share/keyrings ~/.local/share/oldkeyrings
```
Using move also makes sure that the other new files in ~/.local/share/keyrings are not there to interfere.

Copy the old keyring to the fresh installation:

mkdir ~/.local/share/keyrings && cp -r /BACKUPDESTINATION/home/$USER/.gnome2/keyrings/{login.keyring,user.keystore} ~/.local/share/keyrings

For gpg keys you'll have to copy ~/.gnupg over to the new install as well.

Make sure only you can access them and own them:

sudo chmod -R 600 ~/.local/share/keyrings/ && sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.local/share/keyrings

(might not be necessary)

Log out and back in again

Ubuntu – Certificates -> Gnome2 Key Storage folder: cannot unlock

So I'm not entirely sure this is exactly what you want to do but I'm having the same problem so I resorted to CLI:

certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t "C,," -n <certificate nickname> -i <certificate filename>

Make sure you have libnss3-tools installed

sudo apt-get install libnss3-tools

This worked like a charm for me. It doesn't solve the GUI issue but at least I don't have to verify each one of my company's internal CA-based sites.

For the record, I got the info from here.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How migrate the keyring (containing ssh passprases, nautilus remote filesystem, pgp passwords) and network manager connections

Wifi Passwords

Migrate keys and passwords

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