[CentOS] GUI login issues over NFS

Thu Jan 26 15:46:37 UTC 2012
Weiner, Michael <weinerm at ccf.org>

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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