[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#841878: policykit-1: Authentication fails with valid credentials

[Brian Vaughan]

Also: I had a VM, set up with Debian unstable and XFCE, which I just
updated yesterday. Prior to updating, Synaptic launched from the menu
system without issue; after updating, I see the same behavior as on my
laptop, for which I filed the bug. The VM had updated to policykit-1
0.105-17.

Both systems use the XFCE interface and have sudo configured.

Synaptic is the application where I first noticed the issue, but I'm fairly
sure it's not a Synaptic issue per se. I get the same error message if I
execute 'pkexec whoami', for instance.

A few months ago, I'd had Debian stretch, with XFCE, on that laptop. After
a few weeks, I had what seemed to be the same issue I'm seeing now.
Unfortunately I'd wiped the laptop in between and so don't have any logs.

>From what I've seen from some bug searches and general Web searches, there
are a fair number of reports of applications that require authentication
failing to launch from the menu system after an update, but working fine
when launched from the command line with sudo. Synaptic is mentioned most
often, including similar errors involving 'synaptic-pkexec' at the command
line. None mention fixes, but a few mention the problem goes away again
after an update. A lot of them mention XFCE, but I don't recall any other
desktop environments mentioned.

policykit-1 was my best guess about where the problem lies. Please let me
know if there's anything further I can do to assist in troubleshooting.

On Oct 24, 2016 10:38 AM, "Brian Vaughan" <bgvaughan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/24/2016 02:28 AM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 at 21:13:24 -0700, Brian Vaughan wrote:
> >> Authenticating as: Brian Vaughan,,, (brian)
> >> Password:
> >> polkit-agent-helper-1: pam_authenticate failed: Authentication failure
> >
> > Please look in /var/log/auth.log for clues as to why your configured PAM
> > stack might have refused your valid credentials.
> >
> > (It's entirely possible that this was caused by a policykit-1 change,
> > but to know what to do about it, we'll likely need that information.)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >     S
> >
>
> Here's the part of the auth.log from first launching synaptic through
> the desktop menu, and second from 'synaptic-pkexec' at the command line.
> (Full log is attached.)
>
> Oct 24 10:22:13 brian-laptop polkitd[666]: Registered Authentication
> Agent for unix-process:1413:40576 (system bus name :1.54 [pkexec
> /usr/sbin/synaptic], object path
> /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_US.UTF-8)
> Oct 24 10:22:24 brian-laptop polkitd[666]: Operator of
> unix-process:1413:40576 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for
> action com.ubuntu.pkexec.synaptic for unix-process:1413:40576 [/bin/sh
> /usr/bin/synaptic-pkexec] (owned by unix-user:brian)
> Oct 24 10:22:24 brian-laptop pkexec[1414]: brian: Error executing
> command as another user: Not authorized [USER=root] [TTY=/dev/pts/0]
> [CWD=/home/brian] [COMMAND=/usr/sbin/synaptic]
> Oct 24 10:22:24 brian-laptop polkitd[666]: Unregistered Authentication
> Agent for unix-process:1413:40576 (system bus name :1.54, object path
> /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_US.UTF-8)
> Oct 24 10:22:55 brian-laptop sudo:    brian : TTY=pts/0 ;
> PWD=/home/brian ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/cp /var/log/auth.log auth.log
> Oct 24 10:22:55 brian-laptop sudo: pam_unix(sudo:session): session
> opened for user root by (uid=0)
>
> The error message in the terminal was slightly different.
>
> ==== AUTHENTICATING FOR com.ubuntu.pkexec.synaptic ===
> Authentication is required to run the Synaptic Package Manager
> Authenticating as: Brian Vaughan,,, (brian)
> Password:
> polkit-agent-helper-1: error response to PolicyKit daemon:
> GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: No session for cookie
> ==== AUTHENTICATION FAILED ===
> Error executing command as another user: Not authorized
>
> This incident has been reported.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-utopia-maintainers/attachments/20161026/6af08293/attachment.html>