Re: permissions and connection editor

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 17:46 +0200, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> Since my troubles with nm-connection-editor continued, I decided to remove
> and install again all of gnome, consolekit, keyring, and
> policykit. However, the problems remain.
> 
> 
> 1. I cannot add wireless connections, as non-root, if they have any kind
> of security. The "Save" box is greyed, and I get repeated messages saying 
> 
> ** (nm-connection-editor:22077): WARNING **: Invalid setting Wireless Security: Invalid wireless security

You may get this periodically; but this warning means that there is some
piece of the wifi security tab that isn't yet valid.  What security are
you using?  WPA PSK?  WPA Enterprise?  WEP?

> 
> 2. If I try to access one of the available wireless networks, and enter
> the authentication info (e.g., CA certificate, password, etc) then I get a
> box asking for the root password.
> 
> However, when I enter the root password, it stays there for a long time,
> and eventually I get a message saying "You are not allowed to modify the
> system configuration" and "An error occurred while checking for
> authorizations: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the
> remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy
> blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection
> was broken.  You may report this as a bug."

This seems like a PolicyKit bug or some misconfiguration thereof.  NM's
usage of PolicyKit is pretty simple: it just asks polkitd if the user is
authorized.  Then PolicyKit takes over.  Can you perhaps paste some logs
of NetworkManager (/var/log/messages, or /var/log/daemon.log,
of /var/log/NetworkManager.log) that show what's going on when this
error happens?

> 
> 
> Error 2. also happens if I try to, say, access any system-wide
> configuration that require root access (e.g., services).
> 
> 
> So I am not sure where the error is, nor what can I do, since I have
> reinstalled everything (after purging configuration files). I am using
> Debian, and here are some of the relevant packages. (Note, though, that
> gnome-keyring seems to work, at least with other programs).
> 
> 
> network-manager                                 0.9.0-2 
> network-manager-gnome                           0.9.0-4  
> policykit-1                                     0.102-1 
> policykit-1-gnome                               0.104-1
> consolekit					0.4.5-1
> gnome-keyring                                   3.0.3-2
> libgnome-keyring0                               3.2.0-3
> libpam-gnome-keyring                            3.0.3-2
> python-gnomekeyring                             2.32.0-4

Definitely sounds like a PolicyKit problem.  There are some things you
can do, like using pkcheck to test this stuff out, but you might get
better debugging help by asking PolicyKit people too.

Dan