I run fedora 41 with both gnome and i3wm sessions installed, but usually with i3wm. gnome-keyring-daemon is being used by chrome, webstorm, and various apps for credential storage [^1]
After a recent dnf update
and a reboot, I got the message on opening vscode, that "The password you use to log in to your computer no longer matches that of your login keyring”. I was able to confirm the problem in seahorse, as seahorse won’t unlock the Login keyring with my login password with a similar error. The dialog also pops for any app that is using libsecret for credentials storage (chrome/webstorm/etc)
I tried my current login password, which hasn’t changed for some time, at least the year, and it was not having it. After a bit of reading [^2], [^3] it seems like it does happen that the keyring password gets reset, but not by the user changing their password. I also tried the root password, and blank, and a few others that i thought it might have got set to, but nope, can’t unlock.
I can see from backups that the keyrings file has been updated a few times recently:
Filename |MD5 |JobId|StartTime |
-------------+----------------------+-----+-----------------------+
login.keyring|pbjGSDPz08LO20G8hFq25A|39635|2025-05-21 10:30:04.000|
login.keyring|KNJLkS/1x+IgsqpdYUGwvA|39450|2025-05-19 13:30:05.000|
login.keyring|KK//q+5KaJPwFTp18vkWRg|39429|2025-05-19 08:30:04.000|
login.keyring|XnZMxLfkQ+R25DZ8OYxghg|39417|2025-05-19 04:30:05.000|
login.keyring|DBOdy+YERrhSkF80lEAkcA|39355|2025-05-18 14:30:05.000|
login.keyring|6fWrQoKY/AsNZs+hICejlA|39281|2025-05-17 20:30:05.000|
login.keyring|xhQNMloukmi/PzPFlR8rbA|39275|2025-05-17 18:30:05.000|
login.keyring|6uTeSu/K1nNaIOEzO7cihQ|39174|2025-05-16 17:30:04.000|
login.keyring|OAqrXwvVHxUTBiule6E1jQ|39165|2025-05-16 16:30:04.000|
I tried restoring the previous version from the backup, but it doesn’t seem to want to accept my login password for that one either. However maybe I am not understanding how the gnome-keyring-daemon.service is loading the login.keyring.
the steps i did were
killall gnome-keyring-daemon
cp ~/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring ~/login.keyring.bak
- restore the backup
cp /backup/restore/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring ~/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring
- start the gnome-keyring-daemon in the foreground
- try and open the login keyring from seahorse
the above did not work.
I have restored all those historical backups to a tmp folder. how can i test them with an unlock password?
Any other steps I can take to determine what is likely to have changed the password for the login keyring?
note:
presumably being started by d-bus activtation, as i don’t see anything in my co
– link removed due to restrictions –
–link removed due to restrictions–