Comment 2 for bug 1311927

This looks like a duplicate of : https://bugs.launchpad.net/plainbox/+bug/1299201. To sum up, plainbox tries to use policykit to run privileged jobs, but polkit is unhappy over ssh with our secure policy.

The odd behaviors you see can be explained as follows:

- checkbox (old) tries to launch a privileged backend at the beginning. If authentication fails, the non-privileged frontend will continue but will be unable to run root jobs.

- I think if you install over APT you probably get the insecure policy (see linked bug to learn why this works). Whereas perhaps the tarball includes the secure policy. I'll check the policy packages and see what you get and whether switching policies is likely to help.