How do I shut down a system through a ConsoleKit DBus message as user?

Question

I found the following command line to shut down a Debian/GNU Linux system

dbus-send \
  --system \
  --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit \
  --type=method_call \
  --print-reply \
  --reply-timeout=2000 \
  /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager \
  org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.Stop

It works if I execute the command as superuser, but as a non-privileged user it says:

Error org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.NotPrivileged: Not Authorized

I would like to know if it is possible to modify such a command in such a way that, interacting with PolicyKit, it can grant the privilege to shut down the system to a normal user.

Answer 1

According to this Debian bug report, this is due to an upstream change in ConsoleKit between versions 0.4.1 and 0.4.2. The thread contains a few suggestions and workarounds, one of which is to install a display manager (like GDM or lightdm) that talks with ConsoleKit directly.

Answer 2

If you use consolekit > 0.4.1 (wheezy and newer) this doesn't work any more out of the box. To get it working again add

session optional        pam_loginuid.so

to /etc/pam.d/common-session.

Answer 3

In my case:

• Debian 8 amd64;
• fluxbox;
• startx (without any DM).
• installed packages:
  • dbus
  • dbus-X11
  • consolekit
  • policykit-1
  • libpam-ck-connector

This solution works good:

Create a custom-actions.pkla file with the following contents:

sudo nano /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/custom-actions.pkla

Put this in the file.

[Actions for xbmc user]
Identity=unix-user:xbmc
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.*;org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.*;org.freedesk​top.udisks.*
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes