Annoying systemd-ask-pass messages

2021-01-30

I usually deploy my OpenVPN tunnels into /etc/openvpn/client/tunnelname.conf and (if they're not "always on" VPNs) start, stop and restart them with the corresponding systemctl commands, i.e., sudo systemctl restart openvpn-client@tunnelname.conf

Now I had a deployment that requires certificate and LDAP authentication. The LDAP credentials are queried through the config file parameter auth-user-pass.

Authentication works fine. However, on every connection attempt I had the following output in every currently running shell, which -- with the way I work -- can be a lot of shells:

Broadcast message from root@hostname (Fri 2021-01-30 08:04:23 CET):

Password entry required for 'Enter Auth Password:' (PID 33571).
Please enter password with the systemd-tty-ask-password-agent tool.

As I usually have a ton of shells open, this was very annoying. My tunnel restart was interactive anyways, so I already had the password prompt right in front of me. No need to mess up all my other shells.

Stopping systemd-ask-password-wall.service and systemd-ask-password-wall.path stopped the annoying messages.