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Forum Discussion
Suddenly, Ubuntu Dropbox wants authentication and won't start
I've been running Dropbox on my Ubuntu 18.04 desktop just fine for months. Today, I noticed the application had stopped, so I tried to start it again and it said "Authentication is needed to run '/bi...
Hi Emanuele P.1. I went back and forth with the Dropbox engineering team for two months with no solution. Then I finally just randomly on my own tried removing the 10 or so symlinks that happened to be in my Dropbox directories, and that made it all start working normally again.
I see Lusil gave you that suggestion, so maybe my experience has now made it into the Dropbox manual.
Hope that helps!
Is there a known solution for this issue? It suddenly started the same behavior both for my laptopt (Ubuntu 18.10) and my wife's (Ubuntu 16.04 and, to try fixing it, Ubuntu 18.10).
In both cases the issue started when Dropbox had to sync a big amount of data (several dozens GB). It stopped syncing halfway, and started giving this problem every time after. Reinstalling Dropbox (from command line or software center, even deleting the hidden preference folders) doesn't solve it.
Hi Emanuele P.1. I went back and forth with the Dropbox engineering team for two months with no solution. Then I finally just randomly on my own tried removing the 10 or so symlinks that happened to be in my Dropbox directories, and that made it all start working normally again.
I see Lusil gave you that suggestion, so maybe my experience has now made it into the Dropbox manual.
Hope that helps!
I had this too, under Ubuntu 18.10. I tried uninstalling/purging nautilius-dropbox and reinstalling from their web site. I tried deleting symlinks in ~/Dropbox. (both of these are solutions listed elsewhere). Neither helped. The following solved the problem for me:
I noticed that in the terminal used for `dropbox start`, dropbox was telling me what to do. It says:
Please run "echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p" and restart Dropbox to fix the problem.
So I did that, and it fixed the problem for me.
Thanks eater, I will try the same then! It's very likely that I had moved some symlinks in the Dropbox folder just before.
It appears the question from dropboxd asking for the root password is related to PolicyKit and the 'pkexec' command, wanting to execute as another user. I am not sure what it is attempting to do under another user, perhaps change ownership as Dropbox on OS X will ask from time to time to obtain root in order to change directory permissions. Regardless it doesn't attempt to su or sudo to another user when PolicyKit is not installed.
PolicyKit is installed with things like libvirt, XFree86 / Linux desktop stuff, and some other things I believe. It got installed when I installed virt-manager so I could run some virtual machines on my Linux server w/ qemu via a X GUI w/ X11 forwarding. I no longer had a need for this, removed PolicyKit (and thus pkexec) and it is no longer asking for root.
If you wish to keep PolicyKit installed, I would suggest finding out how to add privileges for your dropbox user to use pkexec. I was denied after entering the root password as PK was apparently not configured to allow my user, 'dropboxuser', to execute anything with it. I don't think it's harmful; it's probably just trying to change some permissions. But I cannot be sure. You could enable auditing or do some strace/ltrace of the software and determine for sure.
Regards!
