What the heck is a dbus?

[Jeff Kinz]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 10:52:19AM -0500, Dan Coutu wrote:
> On a new installation of Centos 4.2 (a RHEL clone from source) I'm 
> seeing the following error in the messages file:
> 
> Mar  3 15:55:06 hanka dbus: Can't send to audit system: USER_AVC 
> pid=2521 uid=81 loginuid=-1 message=avc:  denied  { send_msg } for  
> scontext=root:system_r:unconfined_t tcontext=user_u:system_r:initrc_t 
> tclass=dbus
> 
> 
> I've never heard of a dbus. So first of all, what's a dbus, and 
> secondly, what does this error mean?

IIRC dbus is used to send messages from the hald to user space.
Translated that means that dbus is a new messaging system used by the
new "hardware abstraction layer daemon" (hald) which were both
implemented as party of a new effort to make hardware devices like USB
better able to do plug and play on Linux.


As for #2, it looks like, (and you probably already figured this much
out yourself), dbus isn't able to deliver a message to the audit
subsystem (whatever that is :-) )

This could be a timing issue, as in the audit service isn't up yet, but
dbus doesn't know that and is sending to it anyway?
(Just a WAG)


I'm not seeing it on my Centos 4.2 install. (Toshiba satellite laptop)

FWIW some part of these tools use some gnome libraries.. (iirc)



-- 
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
speech recognition software may have been used to create this e-mail