I am working on a script that will detect if and when a Gnome session is "locked" by a user in order to kick that user and prevent people locking screens in a public use lab. However, it seems the only way to do this is to launch a dbus-monitor as follows:

dbus-monitor --session \ "type=signal,interface=org.gnome.ScreenSaver"

Unfortunately I can't get this to work as root, no matter how many things I try. I have tried the following:

1

eval `dbus-launch`
dbus-monitor --session ...

This fails to launch with the same error

2

export $(dbus-launch)
dbus-monitor --session ...

This launches but doesn't successfully monitor the messages.

3

eval `dbus-launch`
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
dbus-monitor --session ...

This launches but doesn't monitor the messages

The exact error when I do get the X11 session error is as follows:

Failed to open connection to session message bus: dbus-launch failed to autolaunch D-Bus session: Fd 4 did not have the close-on-exec flag set!  Setting the flag.
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.

So simply, I need to be able to monitor the session org.gnome.ScreenSaver dbus messages remotely (ideally as root, since setting up a new user can be a pain) and can't figure out how to do that. It should also be added that if I'm logged in as a user I can run the dbus-monitor command by itself without any problems (it logs as expected).

More info because it can't hurt.

Kernel: RHEL5

 2.6.18-406.el5

DBUS Version:

D-Bus Message Bus Launcher 1.1.2

GNOME Version:

2.16.0

Solution 1:

The problem is that dbus-monitor doesn't know where to connect to as it's running as a different user/session (root). You can get the DBUS ADDRESS from the environment with something like:

DBUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(pidof -s gnome-session)/environ)
dbus-monitor --address "$DBUS_ADDRESS"  "type=signal,interface=org.gnome.ScreenSaver"

Those commands try to find the running process with pidof -s gnome-session, then look at the environment and grep for the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and assign it to DBUS_ADDRESS, then uses the variable to tell dbus-monitor what message bus to monitor.

Keep in mind that if you have multiple sessions it will only work with the "first".