eirini-station

Common pairing environment for the Eirini Project. You can set up a development VM locally on Virtualbox or on the cloud using GCP.

Common prerequisites

In order to run the eirini-station VM you need to:

• Install Vagrant:

  brew cask install vagrant
  

• Install GnuPG:

  brew install gnupg
  

• Set up your GPG store with your private key and everyone's public keys (see eirini-private-config for more details)
• Load your SSH key in the ssh agent (even if you are using a key from your ~/.ssh dir you still need to load it):

  ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
  

Forwarding your GPG agent to a remote station

When you create your station your GPG key will not be copied to it for security reasons. Instead, your gpg-agent socket will be forwarded to the remote station so that the gpg program can access it. If you are the owner of the station you can just vagrant ssh and your socket will be automatically forwarded, but if you are joining a teammate's session you should pass some extra args to ssh in order to do the forwarding. To make this easy there are some aliases defined in the home config. The host can use those to generate the connection command and send it to you. Here is how they work:

• on a gloud machine the owner should run pssh
• on a local virtualbox machine the owner should run lsgrok

Running the oneliner that the station owner sent you will log you onto the machine with your gpg agent socket forwarded.

Switching between the GPG sockets of the station owner and a guest

Since both the station owner and their pair have their GPG agent sockets forwarded, there needs to be a way to switch between the two sockets. This can be done using the fix-gpg alias defined in eirini-home. If you are the guest and you want to use gpg while your host is away, you can run fix-gpg guest. If you are the host and want to reacquire control, you can run fix-gpg with no args.

You can check which socket is active at any time by running who-gpg.