I am at my wits end, googling, trying various things, and nothing seems to really solve my problem, so I thought I would break down and write to the community to see if anyone else has run into the issue and actually solved it. My environment of interest contains a mix of various Fedora and CentOS workstations that all participate in NIS for user authentication which then, upon a successful login, automount an NFS $HOME directory. And here is the rub, I am migrating that NFS back end FROM a Sun X4540 (which has been working flawlessly for the past few years) to an HP X9320 Ibrix system. I replicated my NFS exports from one system to the other, and have tested command line logins over SSH using NIS credentials and that all seems to work quite well. However, whenever a CentOS (or even Fedora for that matter) desktop user tries to log in (either Gnome or KDE) they are unable to successfully log in - and are presented with the nebulous .dmrc error as follows:
User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default session and language from being saved. File should be owned by user and have 644 permissions. User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and not writeable by any other users.
Followed promptly by
Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged out yourself this could mean that there is some installation problem or that you may be out of disk space. Try logging in with one of the failsafe sessions to see if you can fix this problem.
Now I have, of course, checked the permissions and ownership of the $HOME directory and also the .dmrc file and they are correct - but no matter what I do, this fails.
Things I have tried: with NIS turned on, without NIS turned on, using automount, without using automount, using all different kinds of NFS options passed to a local mount of the /ibrix/testing area which I am using to test GUI logins from the local workstation under Gnome or KDE - all to no avail. And of course I have spent countless hours/days googling and have even written to HP for some advice.
I am pretty confident that perms/ownerships are correct, but I just cant seem to get anything to work. Has anyone run into a similar problem? Has anyone found a solution? Does anyone have any suggestions that I am not thinking about?
I appreciate your time and assistance
Michael Weiner
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