panama-sudo is pkexec with a stated reason: the reason travels to the
shell over the existing polkit IPC target, and the prompt renders it
labeled "Stated reason (unverified)" beside polkitd's real action
message -- beside, never instead of, because any process can claim any
reason and the action text is the trust anchor. Reasons are single-shot
and expire in ten seconds, so a stale one cannot dress up an unrelated
prompt; without a reason, a running shell, or qs the wrapper is exactly
pkexec. Built for agents, so the person typing their password learns
what for. Verified live end to end -- reason shown, consumed once,
expired when stale, cleared on dismissal -- and pinned by the polkit
reason contract.
systemd logged "Unknown key 'StartLimitIntervalSec'" on every start:
rate limiting belongs in [Unit], not [Service], so both keys were
ignored and the restart limit they were meant to impose did not exist.
An agent that failed repeatedly would have flapped rather than stopping.
Found while investigating reported prompt failures, which turned out not
to be a defect: the trace showed both authentications succeeding on the
first attempt. The failures came from testing -- prompts raised by
background pkexec runs and then cancelled seconds later, while someone
was trying to type into them.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Listing zones and services is what firewall-cmd already does. The
question it does not answer needs both halves at once: a port is
reachable only when something is LISTENING on a network address AND the
firewall permits it.
On this machine that crossing is the whole story. The rules look
unremarkable -- one zone, three services, a port range -- and what they
mean is that PostgreSQL and Redis, published by rootless containers on
every interface, are reachable by anyone on the network. Neither half
says that alone, which is exactly how a tidy rules list coexists with an
open database. Nothing was misconfigured: Fedora's default zone met
podman's default publish behaviour.
Ephemeral client sockets are excluded. A browser's outbound UDP port is
indistinguishable from a service in ss, and listing twenty of them
buried the two rows that mattered.
Closing the port range names what it would cut off, by service, before
doing it, and removing ssh says so when someone is connected over it.
Rich rules are shown and never edited: a syntax is not a setting, but
hiding it would misrepresent the configuration.
The contract needed a recorded firewall, and the reason is worth
keeping. The rule this page exists for cannot be tested against this
machine -- its zone permits everything above 1024, so "listening" and
"listening and permitted" give identical answers, and a blocked listener
needs a port below 1024, which needs root. With the crossing deleted,
the contract passed. It now runs against a fixture where two listeners
are blocked, and catches it.
Also here: polkit response files are written 0600 rather than at the
default mask, the agent sweeps requests left by an instance that did not
exit cleanly, and the write sweep waits for its harness to be ready
instead of reporting the startup race as settings that failed.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
hyprpolkitagent's dialog is compiled into its binary -- no config, no
stylesheet, nothing to theme -- and it was the one window on this
desktop that looked like it belonged to something else.
The split between the two halves is the security design, not an
implementation detail. A small agent process owns the D-Bus side: it
registers with polkitd, receives the request, and hands the shell the
action, the message, who may answer, and a one-time cookie. It never
sees a password. The shell draws the prompt and, on submit, spawns the
setuid polkit-agent-helper-1 itself and writes the password to that
helper's stdin; the helper runs the PAM conversation and reports to
polkitd directly. The password exists in the shell and in the helper's
stdin and nowhere else -- never on a command line, never over D-Bus,
never through IPC arguments.
The prompt takes exclusive keyboard focus, because a password field that
lets keystrokes reach the window behind it is a keylogger with extra
steps. The request travels as a file created 0600 with O_EXCL inside a
0700 runtime directory: a cookie is not a password, but it is a
capability, and capabilities do not belong in a process listing either.
Three things cost real time. polkitd calls back on the same connection
that registered, so exporting the object on the session bus while
registering from the system bus failed every request as "Not authorized"
with no error anywhere. XDG_SESSION_ID is absent in a systemd user unit,
which runs under [email protected] and belongs to no login session, so the
session comes from logind's Display property instead. And PyGObject does
not accept the @ placeholder in variant format strings.
hyprpolkitagent stays installed as the fallback, only one agent is
started, and the comment beside the autostart says how to get the stock
prompt back. Verified end to end, including a real password accepted and
three cancellations refused.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown