DBus remote connection

November 5, 2014 by
Filed under: Communications, Development, General, Linux 

In a project I’m working on at the moment we wanted to remotely monitor a DBus session bus. The system in question has several buses available using different users and systemd. d-feet can connect and monitor remotely via TCP.  The following code will allow you to connect to a remote DBus on a target development board for example.

First copy the original session.conf to separate configuration files for each user.

cp /etc/dbus-1/session.conf /etc/dbus-1/session.conf.<username>
cp /etc/dbus-1/session.conf /etc/dbus-1/session.conf.<username2>

Then for each of the newly created configuration file, add the following configuration but with different port numbers and correct username director in /run/user. The ip address should be the IP of the connecting host, not the server. Edit session.conf.<username> and add:

<listen>tcp:host=<ip>,bind=*,port=<port>,family=ipv4</listen>
<listen>unix:path=/run/user/<username>/dbus/user_bus_socket</listen>
<listen>unix:tmpdir=/tmp</listen>

<auth>ANONYMOUS</auth>
<allow_anonymous/>

The systemd script is rewritten to use a specific conf file for the specific user trying to start the DBus.

Edit  /lib/systemd/system/dbus-session@.service and rewrite the ExecStart line as follows.

ExecStart=/usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file /etc/dbus-1/session.conf.%i --nofork

This allows you to connect using d-feet or other dbus applications (potentially, you should be able to connect for example other services over the network to the new DBus….).

Choose “connect to other bus” and use as bus address:

tcp:host=<targetIp>,port=<port>

Done. Hopefully.

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