On 4/13/25 2:30 PM, Ian Pilcher wrote:
I have never seen this before. After some recent update, systemctl is
now prompting for a username when I try to start/stop/restart a unit as
root.
# whoami
root
[root@ampersand systemd]# systemctl restart httpd
🔐 Enter Auth Username:
(It does work when I enter 'root' at the prompt.)
This is systemd-256.12-1.fc41.x86_64.
Anyone have any idea what could cause this?
As others have pointed out, this turned out to be an OpenVPN service
that was in a bad state. (It definitely seems counterintuitive that it
caused this prompt when acting on a totally unrelated service.)
To the best of my recollection, this happened because I updated the
OpenVPN service (dnf update ...) while it was running. This presumably
caused it to try to restart, prompt for credentials, etc. From memory,
I didn't particularly care about reestablishing the VPN connection at
the time I performed the update, so I didn't bother providing the
credentials. This left the OpenVPN service stuck in a failed state, and
also caused the username prompt to show up when working with other
services.
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