Re: ['N-M is not allowed to own the service "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"']

[Daniel Gnoutcheff <daniel gnoutcheff name>]

On 06/16/2010 01:01 PM, ddreamer ms93 url com tw wrote:
> Hi, Dear:
> 
> I am using Ubuntu 10.04 with regular update. There is a red exclamation
> mark at the right lower corner of the nm-applet icon. Of course, there
> was no signal level. Clicking it results in the message of
> "NetworkManager is not running".
> 
> Looking up daemon.log, I found the following message:
> NetworkManager: <WARN>  nm_dbus_manager_start_service(): Could not
> acquire the NetworkManager service.#012  Error: 'Connection ":1.216" is
> not allowed to own the service "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" due to
> security policies in the configuration file'
> NetworkManager: <WARN>  main(): Failed to start the dbus service.

Yep, that certainly would cause problems, and it's not altogether
surprising that this would happen. The DBus system daemon has a very
strong security policy, and daemons like NetworkManager need to setup
specific security exceptions in order to work. Normally, this is
something that distributions take care of, but here it seems to have
broken somehow.

More specifcally, NetworkManager needs to be able to claim the bus name
"org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" on the DBus system bus. By default, no
application is allowed to claim any bus names, so we need to configure
DBus to allow N-M to claim that name.

On Ubuntu, the file
  /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf
is supposed to take care of that. What does that file contain on your
system?


> I opened a terminal and run 'sudo start network-manager', which showed
> OK. Seconds later, running 'sudo service network-manager status' showed
> 'network-manager stop/waiting'. Somehow, the daemon quit on it own very
> soon.

Yep, that's not surprising. If NetworkManager is unable to obtain its
characteristic bus name, it quits.  The only way to use NetworkManager
is over DBus, so it really needs to have those security exceptions in
place in order to work at all.

HTH!

Have a good one,
Daniel