[SOLVED]GPG no longer supports --no-use-standard-socket?

Question

I've used an SD card for where I store my gnupghome for a long time. I have delegated subkeys and all the configuration for them there. It's mounted to /mnt/keys on vfat. These cards use a FAT file system as I use these keys on multiple operating systems.
GPG with release 2.1 has removed the 'standard socket' options, which means now if your gnupg home is on any file system that can't create socket files (see: FAT), gpg-agent can no longer run. Ironically, this is also the release that *removes* all support for running gpg without an agent!
I'm disappointed this was not considered news for arch, I even wrote a small silly wrapper just for forcing me to read front page stories! (http://github.com/codemac/yosumiru)
The GPG news page had the following:
With GnuPG 2.1 the need of GPG_AGENT_INFO has been completely removed and the variable is ignored. Instead a fixed Unix domain socket named S.gpg-agent in the GnuPG home directory (by default ~/.gnupg) is used. The agent is also started on demand by all tools requiring services from the agent.
Any thoughts on how I can keep my gnupg on a FAT filesystem and still run the agent? I'm feeling pretty hosed right now, and am pretty confused why this feature was removed from gpg agent, as this would be as simple as keeping the old functionality, but maybe forcing the --no-use-standard-socket option to be in gpg.conf
Last edited by codemac (2014-12-02 18:43:06)

Answer 1

codemac wrote:I've used an SD card for where I store my gnupghome for a long time. I have delegated subkeys and all the configuration for them there. It's mounted to /mnt/keys on vfat. These cards use a FAT file system as I use these keys on multiple operating systems.
That's exactly what I used to do as well: mount a USB key read-only and run gpg --homedir /path/to/usb.
codemac wrote:
GPG with release 2.1 has removed the 'standard socket' options, which means now if your gnupg home is on any file system that can't create socket files (see: FAT), gpg-agent can no longer run. Ironically, this is also the release that *removes* all support for running gpg without an agent!
I'm disappointed this was not considered news for arch, I even wrote a small silly wrapper just for forcing me to read front page stories! (http://github.com/codemac/yosumiru)
The GPG news page had the following:
With GnuPG 2.1 the need of GPG_AGENT_INFO has been completely removed and the variable is ignored. Instead a fixed Unix domain socket named S.gpg-agent in the GnuPG home directory (by default ~/.gnupg) is used. The agent is also started on demand by all tools requiring services from the agent.
Any thoughts on how I can keep my gnupg on a FAT filesystem and still run the agent? I'm feeling pretty hosed right now, and am pretty confused why this feature was removed from gpg agent, as this would be as simple as keeping the old functionality, but maybe forcing the --no-use-standard-socket option to be in gpg.conf
I don't understand why you insist on using --no-use-standard-socket...
Some background: traditionally gpg-agent is started by a DE (e.g. xfce4-session starts it). This is useful because gpg-agent also manages ssh keys. However, this is not required anymore because agents are started on-demand and multiple agents can run concurrently.
Now, if you didn't have a vFAT FS, all is good as you call gpg --homedir because it will invoke gpg-agent with the correct --homedir flag.
So, all you need to do now is to rsync your gnupg dir on the SD card to some temp dir, e.g. /dev/shm/gnupg and use this dir as an argument to --homedir, and don't care about the agent at all.