[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2016-03-25T20:39:29Z"
 content="""
What's going on here is propellor has asked ssh to use that as a socket,
but unix has a hoary old limit on the length of filenames to unix domain
sockets -- something around 100 characters max depending on the OS (108 on
linux I believe).

40 characters of that budget is used up by the somewhat long HOME path, 17
characters are tacked on by ssh (for no really good reason given the
limited budget). This leaves propellor 57 characters to make a unique
socket name that's not too ugly, but it decided to put the whole hostname
in there, which blows past the budget in this case.

So, I have changed the code to try to respect the budget while still coming
up with the best filename it can.

So in your case the new path will be something like 
"/home/experiences/instrumentation/picca/.ssh/propellor/diffabs6.e-44ecb7d0.j3awdJtqk5r3HB1I"
-- 91 bytes, so under the limit.

If someone has HOME set to something longer than ~60 characters,
propellor will still break. Since the socket file has to be at a
stable location, and so more or less needs to live under HOME, it's hard to
avoid the problem entirely.

I did consider moving the sockets to /tmp to avoid HOME length causing a
problem, but then other users on the system could DOS propellor by creating
the directory in /tmp, which would at best make it fall back to not using
the ssh socket and so asking repeatedly for passwords.
"""]]
