[OTR-users] Initiating OTR from an irssi client to pidgin

Uli M a.sporto+bee at gmail.com
Tue Dec 9 12:48:05 EST 2008


On Sat 06.12.08 23:28, cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com wrote:
> * Uli M <a.sporto+bee at gmail.com> [2008-12-02 18:30]:
> > 
> > The first message is indeed always plaintext. Usually, you'll just
> > have to wait a few seconds after that until the OTR session
> > starts. However, if no key exists then this first message will
> > trigger key generation (check the status window) which takes some
> > time and will also make another plaintext message neccessary.  Just
> > wait till generation finishes, write another message and wait a few
> > seconds. Then you should go secure.
> 
> It doesn't work.  I waited an hour, and my modern processor should not
> take too long to generate a key.

Did you see a message in the status window indicating that key generation is
in progress? Did you check if there is a second irssi process running as the
message suggested?

By the way the length of the time period is not so much about processing power
and more about entropy. So for example a "du /" in the background will greatly
speed up key generation.

> 
> > irssi-otr itself has no idea about ICQ stuff, that's made
> > transparent by bitlbee. You'll have to use <irc-nick>@<irc-server>
> > as accountname for generation, also see the README or "/otr help" or
> > just let irssi-otr do the right thing.
> 
> I'm not quite clear on what to use for <irc-server>.  /server shows a
> list of servers, one of which is "bitlbee". So I tried:
> 
>    /otr genkey <irc nick>@bitlbee

You should use the same hostname as you gave to /connect. /server shows the
network name first and then <server>:<port>, be careful not to mix that up. If
you're running a local bitlbee server then its hostname is most likely
localhost.

> It generated a key, but I still cannot initiate an OTR session.
> Although I expect a key to already exist, because OTR has worked the
> other user initiates.

If OTR works when the other end initiates then you definitely have a key
already. That you can't initiate an OTR session just by typing something might
also have something to do with the settings of the other guy...what you can try
is to write ?OTR?, that should force the start of a session.

> 
> These are the versions:
> 
> irssi       0.8.10
> bitlbee     1.0.3

I'd upgrade bitlbee, latest stable is 1.2.3, 1.0 is ancient.

Uli



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