FS#33071 - [thunar] Thunar doesn't remember FTP passwords ("forever").

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by René Herman (rene) - Thursday, 13 December 2012, 00:19 GMT
Last edited by Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis) - Friday, 14 December 2012, 06:53 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis)
Architecture All
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Thunar allows FTP logins, by Go | Open Location (Ctrl-L) and will put up a dialog asking to "Connect anonymously" or "Connect as user" with Username/Password fields, and providing the options to "Forget password immediately", "Remember until you logout" and "Remember forever".

It also allows FTP bookmarks since a few versions (drag the entry of the logged-in site from the NETWORK section in the bookmarks-sidebar to the PLACES section) and certainly for those, the option to have the password stored "forever" would be quite welcome -- but it doesn't work for me.

Thunar uses GVFS to open FTP sites and I expect that it would be the gvfsd-metadata daemon that is responsible for storing/retrieving the password, but that daemon does not seems to be launched on my system. It is installed (as part of the gvfs package) and I do have a .local/share/gvfs-metadata folder with some gunk in it, which seems to imply that SOME things manage to launch it...

I expect that this will be an Arch specific problem? (if it wouldn't work generally, the Thunar developers would've supposedly noticed: the remote-bookmarks stuff isn't very old yet).

I'll go ask there as well, even if only to have confirmed that this is Arch specific, and hopefully obtain some pointers as to what is needed to have it work -- but if in the meantime someone could confirm that it's not just me, that would be useful. It's a difficult issue to google for since every single one of these bleeding fora seems to have a "lost your password?" button somewhere on the page, making one drown in irrelevant hits...

Latest Thunar (1.6.1-1).
This task depends upon

Closed by  Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis)
Friday, 14 December 2012, 06:53 GMT
Reason for closing:  Not a bug
Comment by René Herman (rene) - Thursday, 13 December 2012, 00:28 GMT
The upstream copy&paste of this report:

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9631
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Thursday, 13 December 2012, 10:57 GMT
Guess you'll need gnome-keyring for this. gvfs-metadata only stores attributes for files and directories, not passwords. You don't want to store passwords in unprotected storage anyways.
Comment by René Herman (rene) - Thursday, 13 December 2012, 18:11 GMT
As to that second part: "Oh, yes, I do.". But let's not go there...

Yes, thanks, I do seem to need gnome-keyring. However, I did already have *lib*gnome-keyring installed, so I'll follow up a bit further on the XFCE report. I see that Thunar isn't linked to libgnome-keyring, and I wonder if it's possible to replace the then at the moment implicit dependency on gnome-keyring with an explicit one on libgnome-keyring...

But in case people happen upon this report here: with the package "gnome-keyring" installed (which is dependency-free, it seems), the first time you tell Thunar to store a password forever, gnome-keyring-daemon will be launched and present you with a dialog stating that

An application wants to create a new keyring called "Default keyring"

wanting you to set a password for said keyring. Clearly, needing a password to retrieve a password would rather defeat the purpose if, like me, your intention is not being bothered on your remotely inaccessible, single-user machine, so note that you can actually leave the "password" and "confirm password" fields blank and just hit "Continue". It will then tell you that your passwords will be stored unencrypted -- which you will be entirely pleased with. From that point on, the password-protected FTP site should be available at a single click (if, as mentioned above, you have it in your Thunar PLACES bookmarks) including after a reboot. I suppose you will, much like me, not need the advice to ignore all those people who would tell you that this is vewyvewy insecure.

I quite expect by the way that the same procedure will hold for password protected SMB shares in Thunar, the mention of which may help someone find this report through google, I hope.

I'll try to follow up on the XFCE report as to what the dependency should be. Maybe it's also an option to grey-out the "store password forever" option when gnome-keyring is not installed...
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Thursday, 13 December 2012, 20:00 GMT
gvfs uses libsecret to communicate with a secret storage daemon over DBUS. Both KDE ksecretservice and gnome-keyring implement those APIs, so applications running with a KDE environment can store passwords in the KDE ksecretservice without using gnome-keyring.

As for requiring a password for the default keyring, that's up to you. If you configure pam to unlock your gnome keyring on login you don't need to enter a keyring unlock password.
Comment by René Herman (rene) - Thursday, 13 December 2012, 21:30 GMT
Okay, I'm only finding out now that, to me unexpectedly, Thunar isn't even the one putting up that in the report described password dialog -- that's gvfs itself also. I take it then that this means that Thunar couldn't do anything, even if it wanted.

Maybe it's still a good idea to add gnome-keyring and ksecretservice as opt-depends for Thunar? It might help us poor, confused users. But other than that, I suppose this might as well be closed then.

(as to the keyring-password: I installed "seahorse" to look at things, and I see that it also shows my PGP keys; I might agree that this keyring is a useful bit of infrastructure to have if I can get Firefox and Thunderbird to also save save and retrieve their passwords through it; for now it's just needed for that single, unimportant FTP password -- and I just want it to stay out of the way :-/ )
Comment by René Herman (rene) - Friday, 14 December 2012, 00:06 GMT
Off-topic now, but if someone cares: there's a firefox-gnome-keyring extension on the AUR:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-gnome-keyring/

... but you will need to update that manually on basically each firefox update since mozilla updates the major version constantly. Google chromium (in Extra) supports gnome-keyring natively... but only install that if you are prepared to then wrestle with its font-handling for the next hour or so (I was -- and then uninstalled it again anyway; linux font-wrestling is sóóó 2000-NILs).

In short: yes, you will need a daemon just to log in to your FTP site.

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