Bug#1076728: elogind: privileged operation with polkit fails

[Mark Hindley]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 12:04:00AM +0000, Andrew Bower wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2024 at 05:41:57PM +0000, Mark Hindley wrote:
> [...]
> > All lightdm and xfce hibernate/restart/shutdown options are available and functional.
>       ^^^^^^^
> 
> This made me check: the lightdm controls are also unavailable so that
> perhaps limits the scope of the problem.

I am not sure it does, other than pointing to the same underlying failure. AIUI,
all processes (lightdm, xfce4-session, pcscd...) use the same dbus
integration. I am perplexed why 'pkexec id' works but nothing further. This
still suggests to me some local configuration issue. I hope Simon can help.

Simon,

We would appreciate your expertise here. I appreciate that you have no specific
interested in non-systemd polkit integration. However, I am not convinced this
is an elogind-specific issue; I haven't (yet) retitled the bug, because we have
failed to identify the root cause and it remains unreproducible for me.

In short, several users have reported failure of desktop polkit integration on
systems using elogind.

Basic testing of the libpam-elogind stack appears OK: loginctl reports a
registered session and 'pkexec id' prompts for a password and reports root.

However, all 'desktop' polkit integration appears non-functional
(reboot/hibernate/shutdown in lightdm an xfce4, pcscd mount etc...).  The DBus
error is InteractiveAuthorizationRequired. Neither reporter has any custom
polkit configuration.

Any suggestions you have for debugging this further or identifying the cause
would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Mark