Older blog entries for stan (starting at number 2)

I rigged up a small script to record the title of the active window when it changes (using libwnck). Generates a log like:

2009-05-09 14:16:42,282 gnome-terminal fish ~/lpth
2009-05-09 14:16:53,517 gnome-terminal less ~/lpth
2009-05-09 14:16:55,063 firefox Advogato - Blog: stan - Mozilla Firefox
2009-05-09 14:16:55,694 gnome-terminal less ~/lpth
2009-05-09 14:16:55,922 gnome-terminal fish ~/lpth
2009-05-09 14:16:57,861 gnome-terminal less ~/lpth


Available here.

The dbus at_console code checks for presence of /var/run/console/$USERNAME to see whether the user is "at console".

In previous releases (don't know when it changed exactly) this appears to have been populated by libpam-foreground. Now there is a compatibility script /usr/lib/ConsoleKit/run-session.d/pam-foreground-compat.ck. This doesn't seem to get run with just a local console login. Running ck-launch-session explicitly seems to do the job.

To try and troubleshoot some network manager problems I wanted to use dbus-monitor with the system bus. This bus is a lot more locked down than a user's session bus so doesn't work out of the box (at least on jaunty). Experimentation wasn't helped by the fact that the daemon seems to need a full restart to properly pick up the configuration changes.

I have been able to get dbus-monitor working by making the <policy user="root"> section in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf contain the following:

<allow eavesdrop="true" receive_requested_reply="false"/>
<allow eavesdrop="true" send_requested_reply="false"/>

and in the <policy at_console="true"> section

<allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" eavesdrop="true"/>
<allow eavesdrop="true" send_requested_reply="false"/>

This allows dbus-monitor to pick up method calls and replies when run as root with an "at_console" user sending the method calls (e.g. with the network manager applet).