[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#708828: network-manager: (32) Insufficient privilege - when trying to use GSM dongle (huawei E160G)

[ael]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.9.4.0-10
Severity: important

I have standard USB GSM dongle which presents itself as 2 devices,
/dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1. I normally connect with a script
using pppd & chat which always works.

Whenever I have tried to use network-manager in the past, it has 
just failed mysteriously with no feedback or debug information
and I have written it off as as a disaster of a human interface.
This is its major flaw: if it fails, there is little chance of
fixing it without a major investment of time and effort.

This time I wanted to try a different GSM network, and rather than
modify my script I decided to try network manager again.

Sometimes it found the dongle on ttyUSB0 ( I won't document
the smaller bug when it seems to forget all about it) .
When I use the nm-applet and enter the GSM network details into its
wizard, it responds with the crystal clear

"(32) Insufficient privileges"
and that is all. Great :-)

Turning on logging=debug doesn't seem to give anything useful in
/var/log/messages.

Yes the user is a member of the netdev group. And I did try adding
the user to the sudo group.

A bit of googling revealed that this is quite a common problem
and some suggestions that a policykit permission is needed.

I tried creating a file under /etc/polkit-1/localauthority
(org.freedesktop.Network.pkla) according to one post, but that 
did not fix the problem. I need to refresh my knowledge of 
policykit to check whether perhaps I need to modify that file
to get things to work. But obviously, I should not need
to do that. And 
/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pkla
is very similar.

I did try to install the sid version, but there were too many 
dependencies to make that sensible on a testing installation being
used regularly.

ael
---------------------------------------------------------

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                3.113+nmu3
ii  dbus                   1.6.8-1
ii  dpkg                   1.16.10
ii  isc-dhcp-client        4.2.2.dfsg.1-5+deb70u3
ii  libc6                  2.13-38
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.6.8-1
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.100.2-1
ii  libgcrypt11            1.5.0-5
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.33.12+really2.32.4-5
ii  libgnutls26            2.12.20-6
ii  libgudev-1.0-0         175-7.2
ii  libnl-3-200            3.2.7-4
ii  libnl-genl-3-200       3.2.7-4
ii  libnl-route-3-200      3.2.7-4
ii  libnm-glib4            0.9.4.0-10
ii  libnm-util2            0.9.4.0-10
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-3
ii  libuuid1               2.20.1-5.3
ii  lsb-base               4.1+Debian9
ii  udev                   175-7.2
ii  wpasupplicant          1.0-3+b1

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  crda          1.1.2-1
ii  dnsmasq-base  2.66-1
ii  iptables      1.4.14-3.1
ii  modemmanager  0.5.2.0-2
ii  policykit-1   0.105-3
ii  ppp           2.4.5-5.1+b1

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
ii  avahi-autoipd  0.6.31-2

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf changed:
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile
[ifupdown]
managed=false
[logging]
level=DEBUG

/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pkla [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pkla'

-- no debconf information