Re: [libvirt] [PATCH v3 1/3] polkit: Adjust message when authentication agent isn't found

When there isn't a ssh -X type session running and a user has not been added to the libvirt group, attempts to run 'virsh -c qemu:///system' commands from an otherwise unprivileged user will fail with rather generic or opaque error message: "error: authentication failed: no agent is available to authenticate" This patch will adjust the error code and message to help reflect the situation that the problem is the requested mechanism is UNAVAILABLE and a slightly more descriptive error. The result on a failure then becomes: "error: authentication unavailable: no polkit agent available to authenticate action 'org.libvirt.unix.manage'" A bit more history on this - at one time a failure generated the following type message when running the 'pkcheck' as a subprocess: "error: authentication failed: polkit\56retains_authorization_after_challenge=1 Authorization requires authentication but no agent is available." but, a patch was generated to adjust the error message to help provide more details about what failed. This was pushed as commit id '96a108c99'. That patch prepended a "polkit: " to the output. It really didn't solve the problem, but gave a hint. After some time it was deemed using DBus API calls directly was a better way to go (since pkcheck calls them anyway). So, commit id '1b854c76' (more or less) copied the code from remoteDispatchAuthPolkit and adjusted it. Then commit id 'c7542573' adjusted the remote.c code to call the new API (virPolkitCheckAuth). Finally, commit id '308c0c5a' altered the code to call DBus APIs directly. In doing so, it reverted the failing error message to the generic message that would have been received from DBus anyway. Signed-off-by: John Ferlan <jferlan(a)redhat.com&gt; --- include/libvirt/virterror.h | 3 ++- src/util/virerror.c | 8 +++++++- src/util/virpolkit.c | 8 +++++--- tests/virpolkittest.c | 7 ++++--- 4 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)