What starts accounts-daemon?

Question

Question is simple: what starts the accounts service daemon on Ubuntu 14.04?

root     11495     1  0 13:55 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon

pstree tells me that it's started by init

init-+-ModemManager---2*[{ModemManager}]
     |-NetworkManager-+-dhclient
     |                |-dnsmasq
     |                `-3*[{NetworkManager}]
     |-accounts-daemon---2*[{accounts-daemon}]

But when I do sudo grep -iR 'accounts-daemon' /etc/* it returns nothing, so obviously there is nothing in /etc/init or /etc/init.d or /etc/rc*.d directories that starts that daemon, hence the question, where is it ?

My main goal is to disable autostart of the accounts services daemon on boot.

Solution 1

It's a DBUS service.

root@user-VirtualBox:~# grep -ir accounts-daemon /usr /etc
Binary file /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon matches
/usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.Accounts.service:Exec=/usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon

Another way:

root@user-VirtualBox:~# dpkg -S /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon
accountsservice: /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon

root@user-VirtualBox:~# dpkg -L accountsservice
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/dbus-1
/usr/share/dbus-1/system-services
/usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.Accounts.service
/usr/share/dbus-1/interfaces
/usr/share/dbus-1/interfaces/org.freedesktop.Accounts.xml
/usr/share/dbus-1/interfaces/org.freedesktop.Accounts.User.xml
...

To disable it, rename DBUS service file:

sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.Accounts.service /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.Accounts.service.disabled

Solution 2

Yet another way...

To get the filename:

$ ps aux | grep -i accounts-daemon
root       718  5.6  0.7 398588 121280 ?       Rsl  Jan11 151:58 /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon

Stop it and remove accountsservice package by running:

sudo service accounts-daemon stop
sudo apt remove accountsservice

It will also remove package user-manager, but do not worry about it :)

Additional info:

Package: accountsservice
Description: query and manipulate user account information
Package: user-manager
Description: user management tool for the Plasma workspace

Comments

[Daniel]

First observation: Very high PID, therefore it may be something later in bootup. Perhaps a script in init.d calls something else which calls the daemon?

[Daniel]

And maybe replace it with a simple false.

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

@Daniel well, I considered disabling the filename, but i would like to do it the clean, honest way. Also, it's quite possible it's a chain of scripts, but at least it's nowhere in the /etc folder

[Daniel]

I would at least try changing the filename, because if nothing else you could see what errors get thrown. Whatever calls it should complain about not finding it

[skerit]

Why did you want to disable it? On my system it seemed to be the cause of high memory usage in things like unity-settings-daemon and sound-indicator-service.

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

As for wallpaper part . . . I've learned that with unity-greeter you can recompile a specific glib schema and for lightdm-gtk-greeter it is sufficient to disable showing usernames on the login screen, so user has to type in manually username and password. That will prevent polling accounts daemon and revert to settings in /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf I even wrote script sfor that

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

Does the job, after reboot no process accounts-daemon. Thank you very much !

[Tony Barganski]

This worked for me, saving around 1G RAM and 100% CPU from a 2 CPU machine. Thanks!