pkttyagent doesn't seem to work for virt-manager over ssh -X?

Question

TL;DR: I seem to be too stupid to use PolKit authentication over ssh?

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I have two machines (running Fedora) with ssh public-key logins to a user with administrative privileges (groups e.g. wheel, adm).

When logging in locally on the “server” machine, I can run virt-manager to access various VM's that exist on it. However, when connecting via ssh -X -Cserver, I find that virt-manager immediately refuses to connect to the virtual machines saying that:

Virtual Machine Manager Connection Failure (on server)

Unable to connect to libvirt.

authentication failed: polkit: polkit\56retains_authorization_after_challenge=1 Authorization requires authentication but no agent is available.

I've tried the naïve approach of launching it like this:

 virt-manager & pkttyagent -p $(pgrep virt-manager)

… but all I'm left with is:

• pkttyagent is silent;
• virt-manager exits as soon as I close the error dialog box.

Can anyone suggest a way to, perhaps, register pkttyagent prior to running virt-manager, or else register another authentication agent over ssh -X?

→ It should be noted that running virt-manager as root remotely isn't even an option (effectively) because I have VM's that run under my own user account (qemu user-mode, accessible via Gnome Boxes) as well as system-wide ones, and the local-user definitions aren't accessible by root. Even if I didn't fear the idea of running an X app as root in the first place…

Answer 1

This command worked on my system:

virt-manager ; pkttyagent --process $(pgrep virt-manager)

Answer 2

Have you tried running a graphical agent? For example, lxpolkit, polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1, or polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1.

Alternatively, you could write a polkit rule that would remove the authentication requirement, either for a specific user or for 'wheel' members.

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(Note that 'adm' does not normally mean "administrative privileges"; it means access to system logs and accounting data.)