Re: Lost graphical ssh-askpass with Xfce4 in forky

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2025 at 12:12:27PM +0700, Max Nikulin wrote:
> On 26/09/2025 02:59, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > 
> > I am no longer presented with
> > a graphical interface to enter my ssh key passphrase to add it to the
> > session keyring.
> 
> I can say nothing related to XFCE. In my notes I have a mention of
> gnome-keyring-daemon for GNOME session on Ubuntu and it was 5 years ago. The
> related setting was "SSH Key Agent" in gnome-session-properties.

Dear Max,

Thanks!  I can't see anything like that in Xfce4, though,
unfortunately.

> > I do have the session
> > manually running ssh-add in a terminal works,
> 
> Do you get a GUI prompt in response to the following command?
> 
>     ssh-add </dev/null
> 
> (when no keys are loaded)

Good idea!  I get the same graphical prompt I used to when I have
ssh-askpass-gnome installed, but no graphical prompt when I don't have
the redirect.  (This also means that running "ssh ..." requires a
passphrase every time until I separately run "ssh-add".)  I upgraded
openssh-client from 1:10.0p1-7 -> 1:10.0p1-8 on August 31, so this
could be related perhaps.

> > xfce4-session-Message: 18:07:24.229: GNOME compatibility is enabled and gnome-keyring-daemon is found on the system. Skipping gpg/ssh-agent startup.
> > 
> > Switching off GNOME compatibility didn't help, and my backups show
> > that this message appeared in .xsession-errors even before the
> > upgrade, so there's no change here.
> 
> My experience is that gpg-agent from openssh-client prefers to ask pass
> phrase in the current terminal window and some other agent should be running
> to provide GUI prompt.

Interesting.  But the change for me happened only within the last
month.

> > I'm stumped.  Could anyone suggest where to look to find the cause of
> > this changed behaviour?
> 
> There is a number of ssh-agent implementations and they may be started in
> various ways (Xsession, systemd user session, maybe with socket activation).
> 
> I would start from inspecting what variant provides agent socket in your
> case. Check environment variables and process tree. Examples of threads with
> earlier discussions of ssh-agents:

The running agents (according to systemctl) are:

systemd-tty-ask-password-agent --wall
/usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/im-launch startxfce4
/usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised

Nothing else is shown in the process tree either.

Ho hum!

Best wishes,

   Julian