Unable to register authentication agent: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Cannot determine user of subject – Cyberpanel – CentOS 7

Error details:

After installing cyberpanel, you see the below error from shell when running any command:

** (pkttyagent:8559): WARNING **: 02:28:34.621: Unable to register authentication agent: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Cannot determine user of subject
Error registering authentication agent: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Cannot determine user of subject (polkit-error-quark, 0)

Resolution:

The error is appearing because cybepranel adds the following line in your fstab:

proc    /proc        proc        defaults,hidepid=2    0 0

This is hiding the /proc from your shell that uses polkit. To fix this, keeping the above mount rule, you need to add a group for polkitd user and assign that group to to access /proc. You may do this using the following:

groupadd nohideproc
usermod -a -G nohideproc polkitd
mount -o remount,rw,hidepid=2,gid=nohideproc /proc
systemctl restart polkit
systemctl restart polkit (do this twice)

Once done, you may edit your fstab, and comment the old line, add the following line:

# Edit your fstab:
nano /etc/fstab

# comment the following line :
from : proc    /proc        proc        defaults,hidepid=2    0 0
to : # proc    /proc        proc        defaults,hidepid=2    0 0

# add the following line
proc /proc proc defaults,hidepid=2,gid=nohidproc 0 0

Good luck.

2 thoughts on “Unable to register authentication agent: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Cannot determine user of subject – Cyberpanel – CentOS 7”

  1. Thank you so much, this helped me fix my cyberpanel upgrade! 😀
    One tiny thing: groupadd uses nohidepoc (without an r) and usermod uses nohideproc (with an r)
    For the ctrl+c and ctrl+v people 😉

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.