Problems attemoting to use GPG with a USB watch

[Adam Cripps]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 11:50:00 -0500, Eric S. Raymond
<esr at snark.thyrsus.com> wrote:
> I got a DiskGO USB watch for Christmas.  I put it on my wishlist
> with the goal of moving my GPG keyring onto it, using GNUPGHOME
> to direct gpg to look there.  The idea, of course, is to avoid having
> clear copies of my secret key live on computers that might be breached
> while I'm not around.
> 
> I'm using Fedora Core 3, which automounts the watch as a USB storage
> device accessible through the SCSI layer.  It gets mouunted as
> /media/usbdisk.  I My keyring lives in a directory on the watch
> named gpg (without leading period).  Thuism, when the watch is
> mounted, the keyring is accessible as /media/usbdisk/gpg.
> 
> The last line of this listing shows that the watch is mounted as a
> SCSI filesystem:
> 
> esr at snark:~/svn/gpsd/trunk$ df
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda2             15583200   8321808   6469792  57% /
> /dev/sda1               101086     16596     79271  18% /boot
> none                    517036         0    517036   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/sdb5             17639188  14717996   2025172  88% /home
> minx:/home            25964096  15494624   9150560  63% /nfs/minx/home
> minx:/usr/local       25964096  15494624   9150560  63% /nfs/minx/local
> grelber:/home        115377664  85171136  24345632  78% /nfs/grelber/home
> grelber:/usr/local    37848096   7250720  28674784  21% /nfs/grelber/local
> /dev/sdc1               127456       318    127138   1% /media/usbdisk
> 
> This listing shows that the files are accessible and permissions
> are correct:
> 
> /media/usbdisk:
> total 2
> drwx------  2 esr esr 2048 Jan  3 11:28 gpg
> 
> /media/usbdisk/gpg:
> total 316
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 esr esr     18 Mar 12  1999 pgp.cfg
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 esr esr 157532 Mar  1  2000 pubring.bak
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 esr esr 157532 Mar  7  2000 pubring.pkr
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 esr esr    512 Mar  7  2000 randseed.bin
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 esr esr   1769 Jan 14  2000 secring.bak
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 esr esr   1769 Jan 14  2000 secring.skr
> 
> I then put GNUPGHOME=/media/usbdisk/gpg; export GNUPGHOME in
> my .bash_profile.
> 
> Unfortunately, this seems not to work.  Here are the messages I
> get when trying to use the keyring on the watch:
> 
> gpg: lock not made: link() failed: Operation not permitted
> gpg: can't lock `/media/usbdisk/gpg/secring.gpg'
> gpg: DBG: oops, `/media/usbdisk/gpg/secring.gpg.lock' is not locked
> gpg: keyblock resource `/media/usbdisk/gpg/secring.gpg': general error
> gpg: lock not made: link() failed: Operation not permitted
> gpg: can't lock `/media/usbdisk/gpg/pubring.gpg'
> gpg: DBG: oops, `/media/usbdisk/gpg/pubring.gpg.lock' is not locked
> gpg: keyblock resource `/media/usbdisk/gpg/pubring.gpg': general error
> gpg: encrypted with ELG-E key, ID 5E995ED4
> gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available
> 
> Any suggestions?
> --
>                 <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
> 
> Let us hope our weapons are never needed --but do not forget what
> the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An
> armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the
> final defense against tyranny.
>    If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only
> the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of
> our rulers.  Only the government -- and a few outlaws.  I intend to
> be among the outlaws.
>         -- Edward Abbey, "Abbey's Road", 1979
> 

Eric, 

instead of setting $GNUPGHOME, have you tried just setting 

'secret keyring /path/to/secring.gpg'

in your gpg.conf file? I did this the other day (with a similar
present) and it works fine for me.

Adam

-- 
http://www.monkeez.org
GPG key: 7111B833