DBusConnectorException causes shutdown of bluetit.service daemon

[whatifiwereyou 0]

I have installed AirVPN-Suite-x86_64-2.0.0 on a Linux Ubuntu 24.04 distro using the packaged install.sh script. I accepted the creating of a airvpn user and a service unit.
I changed the permission of the executable bluetit (path: /sbin/bluetit) by doing chmod +x bluetit (resulting in permission level 755), and then tried to start the bluetit.service, but it fails to start. I kept the default settings in the bluetit.service file (no user and no group defined)
In path: /usr/local/bin/, I found cuckoo, goldcrest, hummingbird, airsu, all with permissions 644.
I also for dbus presence in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ and it shows org.airvpn.client.conf and org.airvpn.server.conf

The output of 'systemctl status bluetit' showed the following:
Jan 03 13:26:51 server bluetit[10093]: Boot server https://ipv4.airvpn.org resolved into IPv4 5.196.64.52/32
Jan 03 13:26:51 server bluetit[10093]: AirVPN Boot server list successfully created. Added 10 servers.
Jan 03 13:26:51 server bluetit[10093]: AirVPN connectivity attempt 1 in progress
Jan 03 13:26:52 server bluetit[10093]: Successfully connected to AirVPN server 63.33.78.166
Jan 03 13:26:52 server bluetit[10093]: External network is reachable via IPv4 gateway 192.168.178.1 through interface wlp2s0
Jan 03 13:26:52 server bluetit[10093]: External network is reachable via IPv6 gateway 192.168.178.1 through interface wlp2s0
Jan 03 13:26:52 server bluetit[10093]: DBusConnectorException: DBusConnector: not primary owner (2)
Jan 03 13:26:52 server bluetit[10093]: Bluetit successfully terminated
Jan 03 13:26:52 server systemd[1]: bluetit.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jan 03 13:26:52 server systemd[1]: bluetit.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

I have no idea how to fix this. Any suggestions? I already used a few AI agents, but w/o success.

[Tech Jedi Alex 1521]

5 hours ago, whatifiwereyou said:

In path: /usr/local/bin/, I found cuckoo, goldcrest, hummingbird, airsu, all with permissions 644.

That is strange, because if I download it the modes on all binaries in that archive are 755. What's the system's umask?

su -c umask

Does a user airvpn and a group airvpn exist?

getent passwd airvpn
getent group airvpn

Were the dbus files picked up by Systemd?

systemctl list-unit-files --type=service --all dbus*

.

[whatifiwereyou 0]

Apologies for my late response...
The strange behaviour of AirVPN was that although the bluetit.service failed, the VPN tunnel still worked, so I left it running for a while. Then, when I wanted to install another package, it wouldn't install because of a setting in bluetit.rc (i.e. cipher=etc). At that point (yesterday) I decided to uninstall AirVPN again and give it another try. I used the uninstall script included in the AirVPN package.
Then I did a fresh reinstall (using the 'sh ./install.sh' script), and initially it seemed to work well: the bluetit service started w/o the DBus error, and the vpn tunnel (tun0) was showing up. However, after rebooting again, and checking the bluetit.service status again, it showed as active, but with a airvpn login failure.
In hindsight I believe I may  have made a mistake during the previous installation, since I now noticed in the README.md document that I have to install using command 'sh ./install.sh', whereas previously I may have done './install.sh' only.
However, there are still a few issues:
1) During installation it doesn't ask to create a airvpn-user (and it doesn't exist: I checked tht using the getent command as suggested).
2) After rebooting again, and checking the IP address, it came back with an IP-address in my home country, whereas I had set the forbidquickhomecountry=yet in bluetit.rc.
3) As suggested, I also ran command 'su -c umask', and it showed outpout 0022 (I have no idea what that means...).
4) I have a few other services that were set to automatically start (i.e. enabled), but now I have to start them manually after booting up. I have reason to believ that this is caused by AirVPN.
5) The command 'systemctl list-unit-files --type=service --all dbus*' didn't show any airvpn entries.
I suspect that the uninstall procedure may not have been thorough enough, leaving some old airvpn settings active somewhere?

[Tech Jedi Alex 1521]

5 hours ago, whatifiwereyou said:

1) During installation it doesn't ask to create a airvpn-user (and it doesn't exist: I checked tht using the getent command as suggested).

Can you provide the full output of the script after running it?
 

5 hours ago, whatifiwereyou said:

2) After rebooting again, and checking the IP address, it came back with an IP-address in my home country, whereas I had set the forbidquickhomecountry=yet in bluetit.rc.

The complete bluetit.rc sans login credentials would be nice.
 

5 hours ago, whatifiwereyou said:

3) As suggested, I also ran command 'su -c umask', and it showed outpout 0022 (I have no idea what that means...).

New files will get the mode
0777 -
0022 =
0755
which is rwxr-xr-x. That's the purpose of the umask. I don't quite get where the executable permission is stripped, though. Since it's simply copied it must be during file creation in /usr.
 

5 hours ago, whatifiwereyou said:

4) I have a few other services that were set to automatically start (i.e. enabled), but now I have to start them manually after booting up. I have reason to believ that this is caused by AirVPN.

Do state which services you mean.
 

5 hours ago, whatifiwereyou said:

I suspect that the uninstall procedure may not have been thorough enough, leaving some old airvpn settings active somewhere?

I suspect the opposite: If you don't have an airvpn user after installation and no D-Bus files, something isn't quite right. See my answer to 1) above.
And make sure you're root or at least installing in a privileged shell via sudo or run0 --empower.

[whatifiwereyou 0]

See attached file with the requested info.
The other services I referred to are: bitcoind.service and litd.service, both created by myself, and before installing AirVPN they were always working fine. After having problems with AirVPN these services won't automatically start on boot-up, with a missing dependency error.

Output listing of AirVPN install.txt

[Tech Jedi Alex 1521]

On 1/7/2026 at 11:49 AM, whatifiwereyou said:

After having problems with AirVPN these services won't automatically start on boot-up, with a missing dependency error.

What is this dependency error? Can you share the unit files, please? I suspect something like (some-network-manager)-wait-online.service as a transitive dependency, not something the units themselves depend on.

systemctl cat bitcoind.service litd.service

In any case, I suspect that cping all those files is not the way for you specifically to go here as all manner of permissions somehow get manipulated on the way. Cuckoo in particular will not work without setuid which I suspect is missing, so all trafficsplit* options won't work. It's probably better to rewrite this whole script using install instead of cp which can set owner, group and modes on creation, and which should exist everywhere as well as it's a coreutil.

.. which I just did. It's untested, but I did at least run it through shellcheck with no major errors and warning that are not there in the existing code also. It should work.
install.sh
The script now first creates user and group, then installs the files and starts the service only at the very end. Download it, replace it in the unpacked tar, then run it as usual. Privileged, of course.

2026-01-08 – Script updated. The user/group add is now actually done first, after the user accepts the installation. The install for cuckoo will otherwise fail and be missing because a group airvpn doesn't exist at this point (since set -e is not set, the script will simply continue).

[Staff 10410]

On 1/6/2026 at 11:40 AM, whatifiwereyou said:

I also ran command 'su -c umask', and it showed outpout 0022 (I have no idea what that means...).

Hello!
 

On 1/6/2026 at 5:06 PM, Tech Jedi Alex said:

I don't quite get where the executable permission is stripped, though. Since it's simply copied it must be during file creation in /usr.

Hold on @Tech Jedi Alex, you hit the mark.

You were just misled by this:
 

Quote

New files will get the mode
0777 -
0022 =
0755

0777 is for a directory, but for data files the default is 0666, here's why the user ends up with 644:
 

Quote

ls -l /sbin/bluetit, with the following result: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5644424 Jan  7 11:21 /sbin/bluetit

For the reader, if the umask is 022, the newly created file by root will get 644 (rw-r--r--) (the complement of 666 with 022 in octal) which causes the first problem. So that's why /sbin/bluetit doesn't have x even though it does in the extracted package. It doesn't matter that the original bluetit file has 755, the umask starts from 666.

cp in the original script lacks the -p option so this problem should get resolved by your change with install (it should be solved even by adding "-p" to the cp command, or an additional chmod of course). It looks like a long time installation script issue that went always and strangely unnoticed. Noted down for a fix in the next release or a package hot fix, we'll see. Apparently there is another problem too but maybe it's not related to Suite's installation, we'll keep following the thread.

Kind regards