[Klug-general] Keyring

[Mike Evans]

The keyring thing can be a pain, and I'm working from memory here, and 
of course it's all affected by how your distro is configured.  It used 
to be easy: networking started at boot time, read data from the various 
interface config scripts in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, which also 
contained (shock-horror) any encryption keys you needed.

This can still be done - but most distros these days use 
network-manager.  The principle is good - but it's not quite thought 
through enough as far as I can tell.  Network manager stores your 
encryption key data in the keyring.  The trick here is to have your 
keyring password the same as your desktop password and if that is the 
case you don't get prompted again for it - at least when using a Gnome 
desktop.

However I feel that this model is still not correct.  As far as I can 
see the network connection gets established by the first person to log 
on, when their desktop starts.  In a house network that means you have 
to add the key to each user's keyring in case they are the person 
starting the machine up. Once that connection is established it remains 
- even if you log off and someone else logs on.  This isn't quite what 
you would want as a system administrator.  There should be a central 
place to store keys which are system wide - but if there is I've not 
found it or it has been added since I last tried.  Maybe someone has 
configured it all more recently than I.

MikeE