/var/lib/gdm oddness.

Will Woods wwoods at redhat.com
Wed Mar 12 20:17:48 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 16:10 -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
> Anyone know whats up with the permissions on /var/lib/gdm/.gvfs ?
> On upgrade of certain packages, I'm seeing the error..
> cannot access /var/lib/gdm/.gvfs: Permission denied
> 
> ls -l of that shows..
> 
> d?????????  ? ?    ?       ?                ? .gvfs/
> 
> My initial thought was 'eek, filesystem corruption'.
> Rebooting and running fsck picks up nothing.
> And in fact, when in runlevel 1, the permissions look sane.
> 
> It seems when gdm starts up, it all goes to hell.
> 
> Anyone else seeing the same thing ?

It's part of - surprise! GVFS. It's a FUSE mountpoint. Expected
behavior.

I'll quote myself from a mail on -test-list[1] about the same thing:

When a user logs in, ~/.gvfs gets mounted for them. It's how GNOME
exports stuff mounted by gvfs to non-gvfs stuff, and it's restricted to
the user who created it.

When GDM is running, the system considers the gdm user to be logged in.
Guess where GDM's homedir is? yep: /var/lib/gdm.

I'll bet you saw the "Permission denied: /var/lib/gdm/.gvfs" message
when you tried to install/remove an RPM. RPM tries to statvfs() all the
mounted filesystems - including the FUSE ones. 

That message should probably be suppressed, but it's not harmful and
that file should not be removed.

-w

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2008-March/msg00379.html
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