[Pkg-xfce-devel] Root Authentication Occasionally Required for Reboot/Poweroff

[Gilbert Sullivan]

On 09/09/2011 04:10 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On ven., 2011-09-09 at 14:12 -0400, Gilbert Sullivan wrote:
>> The dialog states something along the lines of requiring root
>> authentication to shut down a system when users are logged on.
>
> Please provide the exact text.
>
> Did you check that noone else was logged on? That includes root.
>
> Basically it seems that consolekit denies you the shutdown because of
> that.
>
> Regards,

Okay, I'll provide the dialog text if/when I see this happen again on my 
own system. I can't count on any of my "users" to do that.

Family and friends are the hardest users to instruct, don't you think? 
Most of my other users -- the corporate ones -- who have the dubious 
benefit of my so-called "expertise" are using the Redmond brand, and 
none of my corporate Linux and Unix users are using Debian testing or 
Xfce. So much the worse for them.

:-(

I can say for certain that no one else has been logged on when I've seen 
this happen on my system or on the others. The systems we're talking 
about are used by one user each, and the only time they might have two 
regular users connected are when the regular user is on locally, and I'm 
on via SSH. None of these users has root (or wants it, apparently). 
Also, I've seen the issue on my own system when I was shutting down, and 
I close all applications before doing that.

I think I see it happen more often on my own systems after really busy 
sessions with a lot of apps open, followed by shutting all the apps down 
and quitting the session via a series of <Alt><F4> strokes.
Maybe this is just something that happens when users -- myself and 
others -- quit apps and proceed too swiftly to shutting the machine down 
or rebooting it?

Thank you for your reply. I'll come back with useful information, if I 
can -- or let you know that things have fixed themselves. That seems to 
happen frequently in testing -- often because of upgrades of other bits 
of the OS than the one with which I happen to be having trouble. It's 
one of the things I find charming about testing.

;-)

Regards,
Gilbert