[systemd-devel] Boot does not complete: Failed to get D-Bus connection: Failed to authenticate in time.

[Nick Urbanik]

Dear Folks,

I am running Fedora 15 on a 4-core x86_64 machine which received a
power surge recently, and spontaneously rebooted.  Strange behaviour
followed, so I touched /forcefsck and /.autorelabel on separate
occasions, rebooting each time.  I observe the following behaviour
regardless of whether I run setenforce 0 or setenforce 1.

1. Graphical boot does not complete; the Nagios server starts, but
    systemd announced that cups had failed, and gdm did not start up.
2. I cannot log in on the text consoles; I can type in the username,
    but no prompt appears for the password.
3. I can log in via ssh as either myself or as root.
4. Attempts to use su fail, but can be interrupted.
5. Attempts to use sudo hang, and require that I kill the process
6. Many attempts to use systemctl (for example, by itself to list the
    state of all the state of all services) result in a message after a
    time out, complaining about dbus timing out.
7. A cupsd and a dbus process are both present, but apparently not
    responding.

# systemctl kill cups.service
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Failed to authenticate in time.
# systemctl
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Failed to authenticate in time.

I have experience with debugging the old /etc/init.d/script approach,
but I am not sure how to proceed with this problem: I am also hampered
by insufficient knowledge of dbus.  This is beyond my previous
experience, and would really appreciate some pointers on how to
proceed.

I am reading Lennart Poettering's "systemd for Administrators" now to
try to understand how this all works.  I have posted to
users at lists.fedoraproject.org, but this list seems to be more
appropriate.
-- 
Nick Urbanik             http://nicku.org           nicku at nicku.org
GPG: 7FFA CDC7 5A77 0558 DC7A 790A 16DF EC5B BB9D 2C24 ID: BB9D2C24