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"Authentication needed to run `/bin/sh' as super user" RESOLVED

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Richard
Posts: 1577
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 10:31 am

"Authentication needed to run `/bin/sh' as super user" RESOLVED

#1 Post by Richard »

I get this message at boot time on the T430.
Not really sure why or what it is for.

Details
Action: org.freedesktop.policykit.exec
Vendor: The PolicyKit Project

Could it be from trials and removing unused apps?
I'll keep running without Authentication and see if I get others.

Just noticed this morning.

Turned off Dropbox, since no broadband --wifi connection is via Android hotspot, and the question doesn't appear?

NOTE: rebooted, no message but external mouse stopped working. :(
NOTE2: rebooted again, signed in, all is working as expected. :crossfingers:

Thanks for you ideas and reading.
Seems I'm the only one to have seen this,
so it is reasonable to assume that it is a local problem, so I'll mark this as Resolved. :)

Have a good day!
Thinkpad T430 & Dell Latitude E7450, both with MX-21.3.1
kernal 5.10.0-26-amd64 x86_64; Xfce-4.18.0; 8 GB RAM
Intel Core i5-3380M, Graphics, Audio, Video; & SSDs.

User avatar
zephyr707
Posts: 43
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2019 5:33 pm

Re: "Authentication needed to run `/bin/sh' as super user" RESOLVED

#2 Post by zephyr707 »

I recently just started getting this popup as well, and you were the top search result, did you every figure it out? I also recently installed dropbox, so my guess is it might be related.

the relevant processes that I see related are these:

Code: Select all

root        4070       1  0 12:51 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/policykit-1/polkitd --no-debug
demo        5264    4250  0 12:51 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
root        6180    5264  0 12:52 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/policykit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1 root
looking at the man pages for polkitd and pklocalauthority it doesn't seem clear why it needs root authentication, so I have been clicking cancel as well, but would like to know why this popped up

User avatar
zephyr707
Posts: 43
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2019 5:33 pm

Re: "Authentication needed to run `/bin/sh' as super user" RESOLVED

#3 Post by zephyr707 »

seems like it is likely dropbox related from a bit of searching around non-mx specific distros. it seems like it either has to do with the auto-update mechanism or permissions within dropbox.

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm ... o_on_boot/
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1062568 ... super-user
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dr ... ic_updates

in my case I found a root owned backup of an fstab file that I put in my Dropbox structure for archive and I'm going to move that out to see if that fixes things.

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