Re: Accessing NetworkManager from a daemon

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2014-08-28 at 11:15 +1000, Stuart Longland wrote:
> Hi Thomas, Dan,
> On 28/08/14 06:24, Dan Williams wrote:
> > At the moment, session tracking means you can't easily talk to NM if you
> > are (a) not root and (b) don't have a session via ConsoleKit or Polkit.
> > That's something we want to change, and that's being tracked and
> > actively worked on in this bug:
> >
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686997
> >
> > But like Thomas says, you can get around this for now if you rebuild NM
> > with --with-session-tracking=no.
>
> Many thanks, I was kinda hoping there was just a setting in
> NetworkManager's configuration that would turn that off or permit select
> users rather than having to recompile.
>
> By the sounds of things in the short term at least, I need to sweet-talk
> polkit into giving me access.
>
> My research has lead me as far as PolkitAgentTextListener:
> http://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/0.105/PolkitAgentTextListener.html
>
> Unfortunately I've seen absolutely 0 on how to access this from within
> Python, so I shall enquire on the polkit lists and find out if I'm on
> the right track and how to tickle it the right way.

Polkit is about access control though, and if you don't care about that,
you can tell Polkit to allow all your accesses.  But the problem you're
having is that you don't even get that far, because NM is checking if
you have a session first.  Can you check if you have ConsoleKit or
systemd session tracking enabled?  If you get a hit for this, you have
systemd enabled:

ldd /usr/sbin/NetworkManager | grep systemd-login

Dan