Comment 37 for bug 1871538

An interesting observation I made is that all journal logs (in this LP bug and the upstream systemd bug) show the "polkit.service: Unexpected error response from GetNameOwner(): Connection terminated" message, in addition to a bunch of other "Connection terminated" errors from changing services across the different installations (NetworkManager.service, accounts-daemon.service, systemd-logind.service, ...). I've also seen logs (from Gauthier) where only polkit.service is failing.

The polkit.service "Unexpected error response from GetNameOwner()" message is a log from systemd effectively telling us that systemd cannot reach org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 on DBus. But the root cause for that must be that polkitd is not running (or dbus is somehow stuck in a deadlock, not responding anymore). This gives a new twist to this issue, as we might be searching for a phantom in (lib-)systemd... PolicyKit is using glib's gdbus implementation.