Package: accountsservice Version: 0.6.43-1 Severity: serious Summary: accounts-daemon.service fails to work properly when there are two users in the system with the same UID. The service is still running, but it shows an error message and makes unrelated software break: gdm3 waits indefinitely and does not start Xorg at boot time. Removing one of the offending users (or changing its UID) and restarting accounts-daemon.service makes gdm3 work again.
Details: After upgrading the system to stretch, gdm3 would not start Xorg anymore, without giving any error or warning. After enabling debug and restarting, its last message was: Feb 10 13:30:17 petete gdm-launch-environment]: AccountsService: ActUserManager: waiting for user manager to load before finding user 'Debian-gdm' This made me think there was some problem with accounts-daemon: ----8<----8<--- # systemctl status accounts-daemon | cat ● accounts-daemon.service - Accounts Service Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/accounts-daemon.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Fri 2017-02-10 13:19:37 CET; 14min ago Main PID: 29171 (accounts-daemon) Tasks: 3 (limit: 4915) Memory: 1.4M CPU: 81ms CGroup: /system.slice/accounts-daemon.service └─29171 /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon Feb 10 13:19:36 petete systemd[1]: Stopped Accounts Service. Feb 10 13:19:36 petete systemd[1]: Starting Accounts Service... Feb 10 13:19:37 petete accounts-daemon[29171]: error exporting user object: An object is already exported for the interface org.freedesktop.Accounts.User at /org/freedesktop/Accounts/User1000 Feb 10 13:19:37 petete accounts-daemon[29171]: started daemon version 0.6.43 Feb 10 13:19:37 petete systemd[1]: Started Accounts Service. ----8<----8<--- As you can see, the service is "loaded" and "active", but it shows an error about "an object is already exported". As I said, after removing the users with duplicate UIDs, accounts-daemon starts without errors, and gdm3 runs fine and starts Xorg properly. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (300, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US.UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages accountsservice depends on: ii dbus 1.10.14-1 ii init-system-helpers 1.47 ii libaccountsservice0 0.6.43-1 ii libc6 2.24-9 ii libglib2.0-0 2.50.2-2 ii libpolkit-gobject-1-0 0.105-17 accountsservice recommends no packages. Versions of packages accountsservice suggests: ii gnome-control-center 1:3.22.1-2 -- no debconf information