Re: [gentoo-user] Policykit problems (blueman, nm-applet, USB mount, etc) after some update

[Alexey Eschenko]

On 10/26/18 3:15 PM, Mick wrote:
> On Friday, 26 October 2018 12:14:17 BST Alexey Eschenko wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> Some time ago (probably between two weeks and month) after another
>> system update I started encountering problems with some userland
>> services like blueman and nm-applet.
>>
>> I have encountered blueman problem every time when I logged in to my
>> XFCE session. Right after XFCE init I did see this:
>> https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/913
>>
>> Probably at the same time I became unable to enable my VPN connections
>> using nm-applet. After choosing my connection from dropdown menu I've
>>
>> seen the error in notification bubble:
>>> The VPN connection "..." failed to start.
>>> Not authorized to control networking
>> Third but not as likely related (not sure if it started to happen at the
>> same time) is XFCE shutdown/reboot problems. For some time I'm unable to
>> directly shutdown or reboot my PC from XFCE "Action Buttons" panel
>> plugin. If I choose "Restart" or "Shut Down" then XFCE just logs out
>> from my session and I will see SDDM. If I choose shutdown/reboot in SDDM
>> then all will be ok but direct shutdown from XFCE only logs me out.
>>
>> And fourth problem is that for some time I became unable to mount USB
>> flash drives from the file manager. In Thunar when I'm clicking on USB
>> drive nothing happens (even nothing in the thunar console output if I
>> run it from there). There is also nothing strange in journalctl when I'm
>> plugging my USB flash drive.
>> If I try to mount my USB drive using "sudo mount /dev/sdX1
>> /media/usb_flash" then all works perfectly. udisksctl which I've never
>> used in the past (but was told to try after mentioning this problem)
>> mounts USB drive correctly but only after asking root password.
>>
>> After reading the issue in the blueman repository I tried "fix" which
>> was mentioned here:
>> https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/912#issuecomment-427648539
>> https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/wiki/PolicyKit
>>
>> It did help with blueman error on XFCE start.
>> I'm not familiar with policykit at all but it looks like there was some
>> systematic changes in permission policies and I think that there must be
>> more correct and more generic solution than manually creating policykit
>> policies for every service which I notice problems with.
> I've experienced similar problems lately on a system where I had erroneously
> left settings to cater for startx, but these were in addition to what the
> Display Manager was doing (sddm).  As a result there were two sessions
> starting as shown by ck-list-sessions and this created a clash blocking things
> like BT, USB mounts from userspace (on any DE) and the like.
>
> You may want to check if you have left any manually created session files in /
> etc/X11/Sessions/ and ~/.xinit or ~/.xsession.

Thanks for the tips. But looks like it's not my case (or at least I
think so):

> root@skobkin-pc /etc/X11/Sessions
> > # ls -l
> total 6
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    5 Aug  9 16:14 Xfce -> Xfce4
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   11 Aug  9 16:14 Xfce4
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2187 Jul  9 11:05 Xsession

> skobkin@skobkin-pc ~
> > $ ls -l ./.x*
> -rw-r--r-- 1 skobkin skobkin     72 Apr  2  2016 ./.xinitrc # here's
> only two commented lines which I used long ago
> -rw-r--r-- 1 skobkin skobkin   8149 Jan 12  2016 ./.xscreensaver
> -rw------- 1 skobkin skobkin 189985 Jul  9  2017 ./.xsession-errors
>
> > $ ls -l ./.X*
> -rw------- 1 skobkin skobkin 55 Oct 26 13:25 ./.Xauthority

> As a result there were two sessions
> starting as shown by ck-list-sessions

I don't have ck-list-sessions binary in my filesystem. Looks like it's
provided by sys-auth/consolekit which is not installed in my system
right now. But I think it was until I moved to the systemd and then made
depclean.

Also after this I tried to list sessions with loginctl but I've got
strange result:

> > $ loginctl list-sessions
> No sessions.
I remember when I used it last time it showed at least one X-session...

-- 
Kind regards,
Alexey Eschenko
https://skobk.in/