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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.

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8
  • 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
    Oct 13, 2015 at 22:00
  • If you just want to disable it, track it down and change the executable filename
    – Daniel
    Oct 13, 2015 at 22:01
  • And maybe replace it with a simple false.
    – Daniel
    Oct 13, 2015 at 22:01
  • 1
    @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
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Oct 13, 2015 at 22:04
  • 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
    – Daniel
    Oct 13, 2015 at 22:06

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

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
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  • 1
    Does the job, after reboot no process accounts-daemon. Thank you very much !
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Oct 16, 2015 at 1:49
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
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1
  • This worked for me, saving around 1G RAM and 100% CPU from a 2 CPU machine. Thanks!
    – Tony Barganski
    Feb 24, 2021 at 19:07

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