Re: Accessing NetworkManager from a daemon

[Stuart Longland <stuartl vrt com au>]

On 29/08/14 01:34, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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

Indeed, I run your command and get:
> stuartl sjl-lxc-debian:~$ ldd /usr/sbin/NetworkManager | grep systemd-login
>         libsystemd-login.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libsystemd-login.so.0 (0xf7387000)

so Debian do distribute NetworkManager with systemd session tracking
enabled.  This is just the stock Debian binary: from the 'sid'
distribution (because the one in 'wheezy' refuses to look at my LXC
container's Ethernet devices).

If I can sort out the session issue, then it's feasible that in our
application, we install a suitable policy file that tells Polkit to
allow www-data to access NetworkManager.  There's examples of doing this
for the netdev group, so it's conceivable to do the same thing for
www-data as well.

Polkit documentation mentions the existence of a text agent, for the
purpose of running such operations via SSH.  Not sure if it's possible
to wrap a mod_wsgi process inside one of these however, so I'm looking
to see if I can make use of PolkitAgentTextListener.

I have asked about it here:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/polkit-devel/2014-August/000407.html

I'll admit I'm still very green with regards to Polkit, ConsoleKit and
all these other things.  As I understand it, I basically have to write
my own "agent" for the web user, which means this has become more of a
Polkit question than a NetworkManager one.  At least now I know where to
start asking further questions.

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland
Systems Engineer
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