KEYSERV(8)

📦 version 14.5, in freebsd 14.5

💅 KEYSERV(8) — bestie, this is a section 8 (System Manager's Manual) situation 🎀

okay so real talk first: this one's deprecated and gone in FreeBSD 15.0, so consider this a little museum tour. but the lore is juicy, so stay with me 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

keyserv — the daemon that stores your private encryption keys. yes, those keys. the secret ones. bestie it's giving vault energy 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

keyserv [-d] [-D] [-n] [-p path] [-v]

🚨 DEPRECATION NOTICE 🚨

keyserv is deprecated and is not available as of FreeBSD 15.0. like, don't go looking for it, she's not there anymore 😭💀

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so the keyserv utility is a daemon — bestie it sits there quietly in the background — and its whole job is storing the private encryption keys of every user logged into the system. what are those keys for? accessing secure network services, like secure NFS. very "your pass to the VIP section" of it, ngl 💅

normally, root's key gets read from the file /etc/.rootkey when the daemon starts up. and like… that's actually iconic, because it's exactly what saves you during power-fail reboots, when literally nobody is around to type a password. no humans, no problem ✨

and if a client with no secret key calls keyserv? then the key of user nobody is used instead, as the default key. lowkey the fallback bestie 🫶

the following options are available:

  • -d — disables the use of default keys for nobody. so nobody gets the nobody key. bye 👋
  • -D — runs in debugging mode and logs all requests to keyserv. perfect for when you're like "wait who's asking me for what" 🔍
  • -n — root's secret key is not read from /etc/.rootkey. instead, keyserv prompts the user for the password to decrypt root's key stored in the /etc/publickey database, and then stores the decrypted key in /etc/.rootkey for future use. this option is useful if the /etc/.rootkey file ever gets out of date or corrupted. like a little reset button 🎀
  • -p path — specify where to search for libdes.so.3. the default is /usr/lib.
  • -v — display status of DES support (enabled/disabled). yes/no, on/off, the vibe check of DES 🔥

🦋 FILES 🦋

  • /etc/.rootkey
  • /usr/lib/libdes.so.3

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

keylogin(1), keylogout(1), publickey(5)

⭐ HISTORY ⭐

The keyserv utility was removed from FreeBSD 15.0. she said "my time has come" and dipped 💀🕊️

and that's the whole page bestie, mwah 💖 this beauty came from Debian, dated September 14, 1992 — yeah, vintage, we stan an elder icon 👑🎀

📦 where this page comes from