Millions of temp files in .gnome2/keyrings

Tuesday, 8 June 2021

Hi folks,

I have a problem with Gnome-Keyrings, my filesystem seems to be flooded 
by millions of *.keyring.temp-* files in directory .gnome2/keyrings.

I have a home server (CentOS 8) where the files are located. On my 
workstation (Fedora 33 XFCE Spin) I mount it via autofs and sshfs into 
the /home-Directory.

I do not have a good understanding of what Gnome Keyrings does, but in 
my eyes I have a "standard" installation, I can' t remember that I did 
something that brought it onto my workstation, I expect that Gnome 
Keyring was already there after the initial installation of the 
workstation. Because the file system on the workstation is mounted from 
a server my problem might be caused by any restrictions on the server 
(i.e. SELinux or whatever), but because it is mounted via sshfs I expect 
that the server is "innocent" as far as an ssh from the workstation to 
the server works. For that reason I post to the Fedora mailing list.

I did some investigation that shows, that at probably random points in 
time each time 64999 temp files are create in .gnome2/keyrings, so after 
some minutes I have millions of files there. Following my analysis.

Workstation:

The OS version is

   cat /etc/redhat-release
   Fedora release 33 (Thirty Three)

and just for completeness, but probably not important, the XFCE version is

   xfce4-about -V
   xfce4-about 4.14.1 (Xfce 4.14)
   ...

SSH from workstation to server works fine

   ssh sysadmin@server3 "ls -d ~/disk1/home_meikel"
   /home/sysadmin/disk1/home_meikel

and the file system is mounted

   LANG="" df -h /home/meikel
   Filesystem                                          Size  Used Avail 
Use% Mounted on
   sysadmin@server3:/home/sysadmin/disk1/home_meikel/ 1007G  747G  210G 
79% /home/meikel

After some minutes/hours of working on the workstation the directory 
.gnome2/keyrings/ seems to be flooded by hundred of thousands of temp 
files, the directory listing takes about one and a half minute (!!!):

   cd /home/meikel

   time ls -l .gnome2/keyrings/ | wc -l
   247263

   real	1m28,358s
   user	0m4,642s
   sys	0m3,831s

Home-Server (via ssh):

The OS version is

   cat /etc/redhat-release
   CentOS Linux release 8.4.2105

After some time (this example was taken during the same day, some hours 
later) the situation is the same, meanwhile there are some millions of 
temp files:

   cd /home/sysadmin/disk1/home_meikel/.gnome2/keyrings/

   time ls -l | wc -l
   2804719

   real	0m49,023s
   user	0m27,330s
   sys	0m22,120s

Further investigation:

To understand what are those millions of files I did a

   ls -l .gnome2/keyrings/ > /tmp/gnome-keyrings-3.txt

and some further manually investigation. Following I give the beginning 
of /tmp/gnome-keyrings-3.txt where I manually replaced multiple 
occurrences of the same line by "--> xxx times". There seems to be a 
pattern where in each point of time it tries for 64999 times to create a 
temp file:

   total 10438868
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 20:39 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000041255
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 20:39 --> 64997 times
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 20:39 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000072888

   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 19:35 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-100000967
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 19:35 --> 64997 times
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 19:35 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000037381

   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 19:32 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000014039
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 19:32 --> 64997 times
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 19:32 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000058050

   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 18:42 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000006582
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 18:42 --> 64997 times
   -rw-------. 64999 sysadmin sysadmin 1162 Jun  5 18:42 
Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut_9.keyring.temp-1000149586

   ... many more ...

The word "Trousseau_de_clés_par_défaut" (it is french) means something 
like "default keyring". To find a pattern in the timestamps to 
understand when those temp files are created I ran

   cut -c 42-53 gnome-keyrings-3.txt | sort | uniq
   Jun  2 07:28
   ...
   Jun  5 10:52
   ...
   May 22 08:12
   ...
   May 28 08:35

but due to the "sort" the result is now unsorted (!!!), there is a break 
in the sorting between June and May. I' m not sure if I really need to 
sort before uniq-ify the output. As it' s a result of "ls -l" it might 
already be sorted by timestamp. However I need a further step to sort 
output by timestamp, so I ran

   cut -c 42-53 gnome-keyrings-3.txt | sort | uniq | while read d ; do 
date +%s -d "${d}" ; done | sort | while read d ; do date -d @${d} ; done
   sam. 22 mai 2021 08:12:00 CEST
   sam. 22 mai 2021 08:21:00 CEST
   sam. 22 mai 2021 13:45:00 CEST
   dim. 23 mai 2021 09:18:00 CEST
   mar. 25 mai 2021 07:44:00 CEST
   mar. 25 mai 2021 07:59:00 CEST
   mar. 25 mai 2021 08:06:00 CEST
   mer. 26 mai 2021 07:43:00 CEST
   jeu. 27 mai 2021 07:45:00 CEST
   jeu. 27 mai 2021 08:22:00 CEST
   ven. 28 mai 2021 08:34:00 CEST
   ven. 28 mai 2021 08:35:00 CEST
   mer. 02 juin 2021 07:28:00 CEST
   mer. 02 juin 2021 07:31:00 CEST
   mer. 02 juin 2021 07:42:00 CEST
   mer. 02 juin 2021 07:47:00 CEST
   mer. 02 juin 2021 07:49:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 10:52:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 10:56:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 10:57:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:00:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:04:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:07:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:11:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:14:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:19:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:22:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:28:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:32:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:40:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:43:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:53:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 11:56:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 12:09:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 12:12:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 12:27:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 12:30:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 12:47:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 12:50:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 13:11:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 13:14:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 13:38:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 13:41:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 14:09:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 14:12:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 14:40:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 14:43:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 15:22:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 15:25:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 16:01:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 16:04:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 16:49:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 16:51:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 17:41:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 17:44:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 18:38:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 18:42:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 19:32:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 19:35:00 CEST
   sam. 05 juin 2021 20:39:00 CEST

So at each of these timestamps the number of 64999 temp files is created 
in .gnome2/keyrings. I can't see any pattern in those points of time, I 
don't understand for what reason there need to be created the temp files 
at theses times and why always 64999 times at the same moment. From time 
to time I manually delete the files by running (as root)

   find . -name "*.temp-*" -delete

which is not really satisfying. Any ideas what is the reason that these 
millions of temp files are created? Why do I need Gnome Keyrings? Can I 
get rid of that software to solve the problem?

Regards,

Meikel