Synchronizing password changes on Gnome-Keyring

I have a good habit of changing my system password every 3 months. However, recently I noticed that when I changed it on GNOME interface, it didn’t reflect on Gnome Keyring (which is the backend for Seahorse).

When looking for why that was happening, I didn’t find good answers. I was a bit disappointed with some answers that suggested removing the whole keyring as a “solution”. Anyway, I’m quite convinced that this does not affect the majority of Ubuntu users, as this bug points out this was fixed some time ago.

I use Arch BTW, and when on GNOME, this bug seems to be affecting us. After some digging, I found on GNOME Manual a entry on how to fix that. It turns out that we need to let passwd PAM integration know that it needs to call the GNOME-keyring extension in order to synchronize the password change with the login keyring.

So in short, here’s the solution. Add the following line to the /etc/pam.d/passwd file:

password	optional	pam_gnome_keyring.so

There’s no need to restart or reload any daemon. Just doing that should do the work. Now to test it, make sure you have the same password for your user and your login keyring and then trigger a password change (either on terminal using passwd or using GNOME-settings interface).

Meanwhile, I opened a bug on Arch bugtracker and let’s hope it gets fixed.