Since yesterday when I log in KDE I receive 3 windows asking for the root pasword and labelled smart for disks sda, sdb and sdc. (I have 3 disks on my system).
I choice to cancel these requests.
I see in journalctl
Oct 31 18:05:55 hpprol2 polkitd[1275]: Operator of unix-session:2 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for action org.kde.kded.smart.smartctl for system-bus-name::1.41 [/usr/bin/kded5] (owned by unix-user:philippe)
Oct 31 18:05:56 hpprol2 polkitd[1275]: Operator of unix-session:2 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for action org.kde.kded.smart.smartctl for system-bus-name::1.41 [/usr/bin/kded5] (owned by unix-user:philippe)
Oct 31 18:05:58 hpprol2 polkitd[1275]: Operator of unix-session:2 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for action org.kde.kded.smart.smartctl for system-bus-name::1.41 [/usr/bin/kded5] (owned by unix-user:philippe)
As far as I understand, this seems related to the service smartd but in YaST this service is set as start=manually and status=inactive(dead)
Is this a new feature with KDE?
How can i disable these requests?
It’s likely that the KDE smartctl plugin/addon/sidget is a completely separate issue than whether your smartctl daemon is running.
After all, the KDE smartctl app is merely asking for permission to access smartctl functionality, it hasn’t yet actually tried to access smartctl.
If the failures are annoying, best to just disable or remove whatever KDE is doing to access smartctl.
To me it looks as if KDE wants to start those from the list of things to start on login.
Did you check in KDE System settings > Work Space > Start and Stop (or similar, I have a translation here) > Autostart?
Or did you start them earlier and do you have restarting of things that are running on shotdown on? Of course that would mean that you started them in an earlier session yourself.
Plasma 5.20 includes a new component which warns the user if SMART values of disks are critical. For this it uses a KAuth helper with calls smartctl with the provided device.
AFAIK, it should “just work” I’m afraid I don’t know why you’re being asked for authorisation, probably worth a bug report over at KDE.
You could “disable” the checking by removing the package “plasma5-disks”.
I found in work space>start and stop > Background service a SMART option that I disabled.
I wonder what is the memory and processor cost of this option. I’ll activate it later and try to monitor this.
Seems that it is coming with KDE 5.20 see
“KDE Plasma 5.20 Will Alert You If Your Disk Is Failing” https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Plasma-5.20-SMART-More
+1
And in my case running smarctl is not even an valid option: I have a HP hardware raid unit (cciss) with 4 physical disks where 3 logical disks (sda, sdb, sdc) are defined. Smartctl see only these logical disks and cannot see the real hardware disks below>:). There is a HP tools at bios start which allows testing the disks and the hardware raid card.
So I disabled this KDE option for my 2 users
It is horrible. Do they expect system administrators to go into all their KDE users systems and configure it off there? Or do I misunderstand this because it is unbelievable.
And how can a user run a tool that as far as I understand it needs to be run by root?
Hi
If your going to use smartctl, then look at configuring it for your setup, see /etc/smartd.conf for information on how to expose the controller and disks.