Network authentication loop

jester011

3/17/24, 2:14 AM

Every time I log into my laptop after my wife has been using it, I get a popup saying "Authentication required. System policy prevents modification of network settings for a all users". It keeps immediately popping back up. This behavior is the same whether I click cancel or enter my password and authenticate. The only way I'm able to use the laptop is drop into a tty line when this happens. I've found the only way to get the GUI back is to reboot the laptop. My wife and I have separate accounts on this device. Any ideas as to what's causing it or how to fix it?

cat /etc/lsb-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS"

0 + 6

networking

jester011

3/18/24, 2:56 AM

Updated with that information.

Thomas Ward

3/18/24, 3:15 AM

Are you and your wife both admins on the system? The error message indicates that you can't modify the network settings which means you can't authenticate because it's trying to use a network setting that $USER doesn't have access to.

jester011

3/19/24, 2:49 PM

My wife is not an admin on my laptop. I'm thinking I could set up a network permissions group and add her and myself to it, but am not sure whether I would need to modify permissions for any files. Do you think that would fix the issue?

Thomas Ward

3/20/24, 11:46 AM

it wouldn't fix the problem, no, if the network connection profile is set to "ALlow for all users" then you need to be a `sudo` user to write to or edit that file. Going into the configuration of the wifi network in Network Manager itself and unckeching "Allow for all users" on that network's configuration and then creating a second user only one on the other user (or vice versa depending on the account) will fix the problem.

jester011

3/21/24, 10:26 PM

That wasn't very clear. Could you explain what you meant by "Allow for all users" on that network's configuration and then creating a second user only one on the other user (or vice versa depending on the account) will fix the problem. I know how to do it in the GUI, but for some reason, even though it's checked as Make available to all users, the problem still occurs.

Thomas Ward

3/22/24, 12:16 AM

Give me a few to write up an answer now that i'm at a computer. This is an issue we ran into at $WORKPLACE and took some minor workarounds to make a fully functional multi-user non-root solution for internet.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Network authentication loop

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