Polkit General Protection Fault

[Arthur Dent]

Hello All,

I have, for some time, been getting these messages in my logs:

=============8<=============================================
WARNING:  General Protection Faults in these executables
    traps: polkitd :  2 Time(s)

**Unmatched Entries**
    polkitd: Acquired the name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 on the system bus: 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Finished loading, compiling and executing 5 rules: 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Loading rules from directory /etc/polkit-1/rules.d: 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Loading rules from directory /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d: 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Registered Authentication Agent for unix-session:763 (system bus name :1.1685 [/usr/bin/gnome-shell], object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_GB.UTF-8): 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Registered Authentication Agent for unix-session:c1 (system bus name :1.29 [gnome-shell --mode=gdm], object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_GB.UTF-8): 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Registered Authentication Agent for unix-session:c2 (system bus name :1.1712 [gnome-shell --mode=gdm], object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_GB.UTF-8): 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Unregistered Authentication Agent for unix-session:763 (system bus name :1.1685, object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_GB.UTF-8) (disconnected from bus): 1 Time(s)
    polkitd: Unregistered Authentication Agent for unix-session:c1 (system bus name :1.29, object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_GB.UTF-8) (disconnected from bus): 1 Time(s)

=============8<=============================================

Should I be concerned? (and what, if anything, should I do about it?)

I am not aware of any undue problems, but it's a scary looking error message...

Thanks in advance...

Mark

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Mar 22, 2015 2:54 PM, "Arthur Dent"  wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I have, for some time, been getting these messages in my logs:
>
> =============8<=============================================
> WARNING:  General Protection Faults in these executables
>     traps: polkitd :  2 Time(s)

Looks like polkitd crashed twice during your logwatch report interval. If
you have the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) installed it should have
picked these crashes up and allow you to file a bug for them.

I believe polkitd will be automatically started by dbus when it is needed
again so you might not ever notice any ill effects. On the other hand, you
might find that you are unable to perform administrator actions from the
GUI when this happens. It wouldn't affect anything else.
> **Unmatched Entries**

<snip>

These are all completely harmless. You should configure logwatch to ignore
them and/or file a bug to have them ignored by the default configuration.

-T.C.

[Arthur Dent]

On Sun, 2015-03-22 at 23:49 -0700, T.C. Hollingsworth wrote:
> On Mar 22, 2015 2:54 PM, "Arthur Dent" 
> wrote:
> > Hello All,
> >
> > I have, for some time, been getting these messages in my logs:
> >
> > =============8<=============================================
> > WARNING:  General Protection Faults in these executables
> >     traps: polkitd :  2 Time(s)
>
> Looks like polkitd crashed twice during your logwatch report interval.
> If you have the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) installed it
> should have picked these crashes up and allow you to file a bug for
> them.
>
> I believe polkitd will be automatically started by dbus when it is
> needed again so you might not ever notice any ill effects. On the
> other hand, you might find that you are unable to perform
> administrator actions from the GUI when this happens. It wouldn't
> affect anything else.
> > **Unmatched Entries**
>
> <snip>
>
> These are all completely harmless. You should configure logwatch to
> ignore them and/or file a bug to have them ignored by the default
> configuration.
>
> -T.C.

OK - Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

This (or rather that) is a headless machine that acts as my home server.
I ssh into it when I need to do stuff (although I do sometimes use the
ssh -Y option to use some graphical tools like firewall-config).

Thanks for the reassurance...

Mark