<html><head></head><body>Perhaps if there is an issue with polkit (or permissions in general) we should always print something like, "Unable to perform action without privileges; try again with sudo." in addition to the polkit message. <div class="gmail_quote">On July 14, 2015 12:59:53 AM PDT, David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <pre class="k9mail">Hi On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 4:28 AM, Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;"> $ systemctl restart systemd-networkd Failed to restart systemd-networkd.service: The name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided by any .service files $ sudo systemctl restart systemd-networkd Works. Presumably this error message could be improved, in particular because that name is indeed not provided by any .service files :-) </blockquote> So if you're not root, systemctl needs to ask polkit to perform authorization. It does this, by sending a dbus message to polkit. If that well-known bus-name is not owned by anyone, the error message in question gets returned. So with inside knowledge, it does make sense ;) Regarding changing this: For debug purposes, it is highly valuable to know the cause of failure. This message clearly tells a developer what went wrong. Not sure we want to change this. Or more importantly, I'm not entirely sure it is easy to change this, as this error is generated deep down in the polkit-code. We could just throw that message away and always return EPERM. Not sure it's worth it, though. Thanks David <hr /> systemd-devel mailing list systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel</a> </pre></blockquote></div> -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</body></html>