Fedora 9: dbus problems with /home on nfs

[David Jansen]

At work, we have a central home disk server (RHEL 4) and all the client
machines (Fedora 8, Fedora 9, CentOS) mount this as /home
Now mounting the disk is not a propblem, but in the last couple of
weeks, desktop sessions on Fedora 9 often crash, sometimes directly
after login, sometimes after a few hours.
In most cases, it turns out that the dbus daemon has crashed. Usually,
this crashes applications like the gnome panel or nautilus, and often it
takes the whole user session with it.

/var/log/messages doesn't have anything more than a segmentation fault:
Jul  8 16:41:22 shelob kernel: dbus-daemon[22141]: segfault at 1c ip
7fa454a5f2e0 sp 7fff5ca79fa8 error 6 in dbus-daemon[7fa454a31000+4c000]

I did some checking, and created a test account with a home directory on
the local disk, and with this test account, there are no unexpected
crashes.

So it seems, dbus has problems with homes on an nfs server.

Has anyone else seen this? Any solutions or workarounds?

I have no idea how to debug or trace dbus; after all, there is the part
running as root, the part running as gdm, and the part that starts with
the user session. So if some sort of trace would be useful, please tell
me how to obtain that.

David Jansen

PS: system is fully updated, including last weeks dbus updates, but that
didn't solve the problem.
Also: I have switched SELinux off, no difference. Also iptables on or
off doesn't make a difference.