Comment 31 for bug 231246

This bug hit me with a fresh installation of Ubuntu Hardy and 2 things were noticeable:

1. USB volumes did not automount (that includes iPods and stuff)
2. all the *-admin utilities would not allow me to authenticate. The button was just gray-out.

To fix this I did:

1. start in single-user-mode
2. dpkg --force-all -P policykit-gnome
3. mv /var/lib/PolicyKit/user-haldaemon.auths /root
4. rm -fr /var/lib/PolicyKit/
5. apt-get --reinstall install policykit-gnome consolekit
6. mv /root/user-haldaemon.auths /var/lib/PolicyKit/
7. make sure /etc/hosts matches my hostname correctly for 127.0.x.x IP
8. make sure that the content of /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf was:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- XML -*- -->

<!DOCTYPE pkconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Configuration 1.0//EN"
"http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit/1.0/config.dtd">

<!-- See the manual page PolicyKit.conf(5) for file format -->

<config version="0.1">
    <match user="root">
        <return result="yes"/>
    </match>
    <define_admin_auth group="admin"/>
</config>

After this everything worked fine.

Hopefully this will help somebody out there. And please make sure this does not happen as this is very annoying and hard to troubleshoot.