I don’t “expect” anything from anybody. I know so little about this stuff that I didn’t even know it was a complex problem. I just posted a question thinking the answer might be self-evident so somebody more knowledgeable.
I do appreciate even just links to manuals. Please don’t feel offended or unappreciated. It just means I will have to do quite a bit of studying on my own before I can maybe get to the coins. That’s fine and I’ll try to find the time to do it at some point. I enjoy learning new things. Still, the coins are not even mine (at least not in a moral sense), and the value is not huge.
Thank you! I haven’t tried that yet. I will. Maybe tomorrow. Right now I’m pretty busy with other stuff.
(It has taken me quite a bit of time to learn about and practice skinning and tanning too, and I still consider myself a complete novice. I don’t even have a hat yet, just a bunch of practicing skins with missing tails and such hanging around the walls.)
Don’t be lazy. All I’m doing there is parroting what the manual for recovering keys suggests… there is no studying required. You can’t expect other people to put in effort if you will not try the obvious.
Well there is that, but in my experience techies are often very bad at explaining things and also assume a certain amount of knowledge that others don’t possess.
I do not have a technical background, but I liked the idea of Linux and open source and thought I’d have a try - this was back in the early 2000s. I was told the open source community was ‘really helpful’ but this was not my experience at all. I got so tired of being directed to impenetrable (to me) man pages that might as well have been written in Greek (I’m not Greek) for all the good they were to me, and if I asked for help I got arrogantly told to go and work it out. There seemed to be an ideological aversion to ‘hand holding’ despite the fact that worked examples and step-throughs are they way we all learn most things.
Pleased to say things have improved considerably since those days and to be a noob still suckling at the teat of M$ is no longer such a heinous crime.
Man pages are still impenetrable in many cases. Just try figuring out how to pull changes from an upstream repo using git man. I did that yesterday, and it wasn’t easy. I found the answer elsewhere.
With cryptography that’s 10x harder, so @davidpbrown IMO you are making unrealistic assumptions about what’s easy or obvious. You’re right that making things out to be hard can be discouraging, but @Sascha wasn’t doing that, he was asking for help, and a way to make this inviting is to provide whatever help is needed - if you are inclined to do so - and to not say anything if you aren’t willing to do that in a helpful and encouraging way.
Just my opinion. I used to be far less helpful than I am now. Receiving help from those who do this well has helped me enormously, so I’ve learned to offer help better and to shut up when I’m thinking exactly the kind of thing you’ve been saying - because it doesn’t help and is discouraging. It discourages the asker and those watching.
Late 90s- early 00s, I was incredibly fortunate to meet the wonderful guys (and gals) at ScotLUG Scottish Linux User Group who all had their own ways of explaining stuff - some better than others - but all with enthusiasm and a genuine desire to spread knowledge. A very active IRC channel that still exists ScotLUG was the rock on which many successful IT careers were launched.
I haven’t had the time to test even the direct script suggestions @davidpbrown gave me yet. It’s not that urgent, but I’ll try to get to it as soon as I can.
A broader internet search wouldn’t be a bad idea either. There’s likely someone, somewhere with exactly your problem that posted the solution. I’m average with computer stuff and discovered that Microsoft laid a trap with Windows 10. You can create a system image, but they got rid of the restore feature. So, I had to manually mount the image to restore after a drive crash. I could have spent days or weeks studying the PowerShell manual. But I found what I was looking for on some message board where the user posted the dozen or so specific steps needed to manually mount the drive. It was not a trivial process by any means. Maybe not the best approach to learning, but it can potentially get you to your destination faster. I can sympathize with just wanting some lines to try entering.
Best way to learn is watch others fail and don’t repeat…
Also, make backups!
but yeah, failing that, cycle through alsorts… the times I’ve broken stuff and found ways to fix, is testament only to how much technology is magic! Recovering broken hard drives is an amazing experience I cannot recommend. Also, make backups!
I’m trying @davidpbrown’s suggestion, but I don’t understand the output about some arguments possibly being “better”, and I don’t know where to put them.
sascha@Knut:~/Maschas_BTC$ openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -md md5 -a -in key.txt
enter aes-256-cbc decryption password:
*** WARNING : deprecated key derivation used.
Using -iter or -pbkdf2 would be better.
bad decrypt
The file was probably encrypted by LibreSSL (using Mac?) and you are decrypting it with OpenSSL (Linux).
You don’t face this problem if you encrypt and decrypt using LibreSSL for both.
