Package: libpam-systemd Version: 232-25+deb9u1 Severity: normal Various policykit actions that flag as for "active" or even "inactive", but not "any", do not work from serial console sessions. After much pain, I'm fairly sure I've traced this down to libpam-systemd not marking serial logins as part of a seat. This causes policykit to decide that the session is not local, and thus its activity state is irrelevant for the allow_inactive / allow_active policykit grants.
This seems to boil down, finally, to the get_seat_from_display function in pam_systemd.c. Granted, serial console sessions are not _always_ local, given that I guess modems still technically exist and you might have dialup sessions, but this basically means that policykit is half-broken on headless systems, and that breaks significant bits of systemd, such as systemd-inhibit, which is where I began this adventure. For headless systems, being able to identify serial consoles that _are_ local and thus should have a "seat" would be helpful. The contents of /etc/securetty seem like they would be a useful starting place here. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.3 APT prefers stable APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (490, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages libpam-systemd depends on: ii dbus 1.10.24-0+deb9u1 ii libc6 2.26-6 ii libpam-runtime 1.1.8-3.6 ii libpam0g 1.1.8-3.6 ii libselinux1 2.6-3+b3 ii systemd 232-25+deb9u1 ii systemd-sysv 232-25+deb9u1 libpam-systemd recommends no packages. libpam-systemd suggests no packages. -- no debconf information
