[Bug 1821415] Re: pkexec fails in a non-graphical environment

[TJ]

Lubuntu is suffering what seems to be a related failure although I
tracked that down to what I thought was a different upstream bug report.
In Lubuntu's case the lxqt-policykit-agent suffers a SIGSEGV as a side-
affect (I think) of polkit failing to authorise.

It was originally discovered when, using the GUI, an additional user was added with 'sudo' membership. This broke the subsequent ability of the new user to make any user account changes via the GUI because they'd get an authentication challenge and then failure. That failure seems to exercise a rarely followed code path that causes the SIGSEGV, and is likely unrelated to the underlying policykit issue.
That new 'sudo' member is also prevented from using privileged tools like "gparted".

bug #1828663 "policykit failures due to internal user id mismatch"

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1821415

Title:
  pkexec fails in a non-graphical environment

Status in PolicyKit:
  New
Status in apport package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in policykit-1 package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  The plymouth apport source package hooks wants to gather log files as
  the root user and apport provides a policy kit policy for collecting
  that information. This works fine in a graphical environment but not
  in a non-graphical one.

  N.B. you first need to create a /var/log/plymouth-debug.log file for
  the plymouth apport package hook to actually trigger this.

  ubuntu at disco:~$ ubuntu-bug plymouth

  *** Collecting problem information

  The collected information can be sent to the developers to improve the
  application. This might take a few minutes.
  ..........==== AUTHENTICATING FOR com.ubuntu.apport.root-info ===
  Authentication is required to collect system information for this problem report
  Authenticating as: Ubuntu (ubuntu)
  Password: ....
  polkit-agent-helper-1: error response to PolicyKit daemon: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: No session for cookie
  ==== AUTHENTICATION FAILED ===
  Error executing command as another user: Not authorized

  This incident has been reported.

  Subsequently, bug reports from servers will contain less information.

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