Why System policy preventing shutdown of Ubuntu 9.10?

[Bhuvnesh 1]

My system is powered by Ubuntu 9.10. as I am trying to shut down the system , an error message which can be stated as follow.
‘System policy prevents shutting down the system while multiple users are logged in’
Then system was prompting for the administrator password. Can you tell me any method to prevent the same?

[Dayanidhi]

The below mentioned command will let you know about the users who are logged in on the computer.

top -b -n 1|tail -n +8|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq

also let me know whether you have seen real user rather than of one who are trying to shutdown. The users who are into the home directory are having the definition of real user.

[Baako]

There is no relation between the users who are logged on the system. hence I don’t think so ordinary users will not be able to shutdown the system until and unless you are not aware of admin password.

[Bhuvnesh 1]

Ok thanks a lot for replying… can you tell me how can I disable authentication check? Or is there any way to store the authentication on my system???

[Phalguni88]

You can resolve the issue by simply adding the user into Sudoer group and I think that is the only way one can shutdown the computer without using the password. However you have to execute following command on the terminal.

sudo shutdown

also you can make shutdown button which you can place on the panel and execute the sudo shutdown.

[BethanyI]

The simplest solution which I can tell you over here that you should add the desire user into the ‘users’ group. Once done you have to create the policykit rule so that it can allow users of group permission to shut down and another one for restart as other user is logged on the system.

# /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/shutdown.pkla
[system shutdown privs]
Identity=unix-group:users
Action=org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop-multiple-users
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

# /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/restart.pkla
[system restart privs]
Identity=unix-group:users
Action=org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart-multiple-users
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

[Addison]

If you wanted to define users to grant permission to identify line rather than of adding them into group. You can use the following command.

Identity=unix-user:fu;unix-user:bar

The rules can be created by using following command.

sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

[ZAHAR]

Well I am suggesting following command on Terminal.

sudo gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy

you have to copy and paste the below mentioned commands on the resulting file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE policyconfig PUBLIC
"-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Policy Configuration 1.0//EN"
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/PolicyKit/1.0/policyconfig.dtd">

<policyconfig>

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop">
<description>Stop the system</description>
<message>System policy prevents stopping the system</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop-multiple-users">
<description>Stop the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
<message>System policy prevents stopping the system when other users are logged in</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<!--<allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active>-->
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart">
<description>Restart the system</description>
<message>System policy prevents restarting the system</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart-multiple-users">
<description>Restart the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
<message>System policy prevents restarting the system when other users are logged in</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<!--<allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active>-->
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

</policyconfig>

It will be useful to do the normal shut down.

[jaykant]

I was also facing the same issue and I got mythtv-backend was running into back ground. I disabled the mythtv-backend and after that shutdown and restarted the computer and there was no prompt for the password. I hope it will help someone.