Found the dbus problem I had. Using strace I saw that the dbus client (initctl) was sending an authentication request to the dbus daemon, which the daemon rejected. The /etc/passwd file was in a bad state, which is why the daemon was rejecting. Another question: is there any API I could use to programmatically get the list of upstart-managed jobs and their state? Right now I'm doing fork/exec on initctl and parsing the output. Wondering if there was a cleaner way. Thanks! --   Marcel Kinard   import com.ibm.marcelk.Disclaimer; ----- Forwarded by Marcel Kinard/Raleigh/IBM on 10/28/2010 12:43 PM ----- <table width=100%> <tr valign=top> <td>From: <td>Marcel Kinard/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS <tr valign=top> <td>To: <td>upstart-devel@lists.ubuntu.com <tr valign=top> <td>Date: <td>10/26/2010 11:37 PM <tr valign=top> <td>Subject: <td>dbus problem? <tr valign=top> <td>Sent by: <td>upstart-devel-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com</table> <hr noshade> I'm using upstart 0.6.5 in an embedded system. After working great for quite a while, today initctl started failing with "initctl: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken." I can invoke initctl from a shell prompt and this error message gets returned to me immediately, there doesn't seem to be a pause at all indicative of a timeout. I'm feeling like this is a problem with dbus, since this message exists in libdbus and dbus-daemon. This is consistent behavior, all invocations of initctl are failing this way. Without tearing into the dbus source code, are there any hints as to what I should be looking for? --  Marcel Kinard  import com.ibm.marcelk.Disclaimer;<tt>-- upstart-devel mailing list upstart-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: </tt><a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/upstart-devel"><tt>https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/upstart-devel</tt></a><tt> </tt>