How does a home user fix a broken DBUS ?

[Rod Butcher]

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 19:48 +0100, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >> Can you guys suggest how I debug why no reply is coming from the
> >> messagebus ?
> 
> How long did it wait for the reply before giving you the error?
> 
> Was it 25 seconds? If so, then the other side sent you no reply. Check 
> with dbus-monitor if that is the case or if you did not get a reply.
> 
> Was it immediate? If so, make sure that you are running your program under 
> the same UID as your *session* bus (not the system bus).
> 
> Failing that, post the strace for your program or for a typical dbus 
> program that is failing (like dbus-send, dbus-monitor or qdbus).
It gave the message immediately, and the dbus-monitor (Which I didn't
know existed) didn't show anything happening. But dbus-monitor showed
some connections to the message bus were indeed working - just not the
system-tools-backends ones.
So I thought - sounds like system-tools-backends itself is the culprit.
I tried executing the commands from the .service files directly from
CLI, and got error messages about a Perl component failing -
Net::DBus::Reactor. So I force-installed that from CPAN and now it all
works fine.
My humble .05 from this experience :-
The gnome app is just trying to access user details. To do this the
chain of events appears to be :
app->liboobs->dbus->perl->system-tools-backends->get user record.
The error message indicates that the .service file was not found when in
fact it was but the Exec statement in it (i.e. the Perl script)  failed.
Seems very complicated and potentially fragile for a home computer which
will be abused and have all kinds of shonky games etc installed on it.
Such a system may be OK for a locked-down corporate pc with tech support
on hand, but the home user will be driven mad if this sort of thing
happens.
I couldn't find any info on how to debug this on the dbus or gnome
websites.
Anyway, thanks for helping me out ! Maybe I can contribute a document on
how the home user can  understand this ?
thanks
Rod
>