Bug#607952: upgrade-reports: [lenny->squeeze] gnome system tools fail, dup dbus conf for system-tools-backends
Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: important
So far I have upgraded two systems from Lenny to Squeeze. My procedure was
to replace the distro name in /etc/aps/sources.list, apt-get update,
apt-get install apt, and finally apt-get dist-upgrade. (That might not
be the right way, and so I almost decided not to report this issue,
but perhaps it is a real issue not just caused by my method.)
The problem I found on both systems is that a normal user in Gnome desktop
fails to open the system tools. Expected behavior is to ask for an admin
password and then open the requested tool dialog.
What happens on the first attempt is a delay of many seconds and an
error dialog. The title of the error box says "The configuration could
not be loaded". The error message says "An unknown error occurred."
Running time-admin in a terminal brings up the same dialog, but also
prints an error: (time-admin:3381): Liboobs-WARNING **: There was an
unknown error communicating with the backends: Activation of
org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends timed out.
There is an error logged to /var/log/auth.log:
.. . . dbus-daemon: [system] Rejected send message, . . .
Subsequent attempts fail quickly. The dialog box has the same title
and the error message says "You are not allowed to access the system
configuration".
I apologize if this has already been reported, but I could not find
anything helpful with a Google search. There was one similar problem
report after a Lenny to Squeeze upgrade, but it was resolved by a clean
install. I did not have time to read all the upgrade bug reports with
titles like "worked pretty well, couple of issues".
After some investigation, I found that there were two configuration files
for system-tools-backends in /etc/dbus-1/system.d. One was named
system-tools-backends.conf [stb.conf]. My guess is that STB.conf was
left over from Lenny. The other file is named
org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends.conf [o.f.STB.conf]. It is installed
by the system-tools-backends package. Earlier I had run apt-get install
--reinstall system-tools-backend, but both files were still there.
It appears that stb.conf supercedes o.f.STB.conf because it follows
alphabetically, and (if I understand it correctly) stb.conf requires
users to be in the stb-admin group.
The system tools worked in Lenny, so I do not know why they stopped
working. Seems like the normal users would have had to be in the stb-admin
group before, too, but they are not.
When I remove stb.conf or rename it to precede o.f.STB.conf, the system
tool dialogs start working, but they come up without asking for the admin
password. So that is probably not what is desired, either.
Hope this helps.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
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