dbus Calls on Update

I’ve recently had issues with the dbus service randomly not wanting to allow connections through its socket connection, for whatever reason… But one error that always annoyed me was when I tried running apt-get update, while the dbus issues were occurring, I’d get a Failed to Connect error message with no way of knowing what its trying to connect to!

The following logs show what apt, apt-get, dpkg or whatever is doing on that step:

jpserver systemd[1]: Starting apt-news.service - Update APT News...
jpserver systemd[1]: Starting esm-cache.service - Update the local ESM caches...
jpserver systemd[1]: apt-news.service: Deactivated successfully.
jpserver systemd[1]: Finished apt-news.service - Update APT News.
jpserver systemd[1]: esm-cache.service: Deactivated successfully.
jpserver systemd[1]: Finished esm-cache.service - Update the local ESM caches.
jpserver dbus-daemon[1272]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.PackageKit' unit='packagekit.service' requested by ':1.746' (uid=0 pid=23791 comm="/usr/bin/gdbus call --system --dest org.freedeskto" label="unconfined")
jpserver systemd[1]: Starting packagekit.service - PackageKit Daemon...
jpserver PackageKit: daemon start
jpserver dbus-daemon[1272]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.PackageKit'
jpserver systemd[1]: Started packagekit.service - PackageKit Daemon.

Now if I could only figure out why dbus is being so temperamental on this system… :/

Update

For some reason, the dbus-org.freedesktop.network1.service service file was missing from /lib/systemd/system.

This file is actually a symlink to systemd-networkd.service, essentially creating the required file that dbus needs to operate, which is just a link to systemd-networkd.service. Which is exactly the point of the file! It’s a D-Bus system service that exposes the functions of systemd-networkd through the D-Bus interface that allows for applications to commununicate with the network management service without needing to directly know about systemd-networkd itself.

Fix!

In order to fix the issue, I:

cd /lib/systemd/system
sudo ln -svf systemd-networkd.service dbus-org.freedesktop.network1.service

# You have to run daemon-reload because we just introduced a change to systemd itself,
# so it requires a "reload" to catch the change
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

# The "enable" option obviously is to "enable" the service, but the "--now" flag
# is to cause the "start" command to run along with it.
sudo systemctl enable --now dbus-org.freedesktop.network1.service

And then, for good measure, also restarted dbus itself:

sudo systemctl restart dbus.service && sudo systemctl status dbus.service

and… it worked…!

Now, how and or why this happened…?

of course I haven’t done the proper research to figure this one out!

I’m also documenting this around about a couple weeks after accomplishing the above task in the first place! So, either it’ll be today that I’ll do a litte research on the issue, or it’ll be a few weeks before I think about it again. Or I’ll suddenly get in the zone of doing a TON of research that gets me no where, but spending a few hours to all day on the issue… I’ll get back to you on that…