Fedora 9: dbus problems with /home on nfs

[Todd Denniston]

I think we kind of lost the OP's problem.

John Austin wrote, On 07/14/2008 03:39 PM:
> On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 08:06 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 13:07 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
>>> On Monday 14 July 2008 12:47:25 Tom Horsley wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:21:28 +0200
>>>>
>>>> David Jansen <jansen at strw.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
>>>>> Has anyone else seen this?
OP summary:[
/var/log/messages shows
kernel: dbus-daemon[22141]: segfault at 1c ip
7fa454a5f2e0 sp 7fff5ca79fa8 error 6 in dbus-daemon[7fa454a31000+4c000]
after gdm login of users on NFS.
]


>>>> I have noticed some kind of problem with logging in
>>>> via GDM when I use a user with an NFS home, but never
>>>> investigated exactly what the problem was because it
>>>> is usually only by accident that I try it.

Do you [or the OP] use soft mounts?
I have seen enormous problems, no matter which OS/version is acting as the 
server, if the clients are soft mounting home with nfs, and it is worse if the 
home directories are being automounted.

hard,intr solved most of the problems we had, and I make a practice of having 
the home directory NFS mounted at boot (which I know is not an option for many 
admins).

the reason I went to mounting the home directory at boot instead of auto 
mounting, is that when gnome can't find one of it's config files it tries to 
create the default set and I would see some strange results** from that, but I 
never tried to separate the soft/auto mount problem, so it might have been 
solved by hard,intr.



Could the OP's problem be that some part of gnome/kde/gdm/kdm is attempting to 
have dbus look at something in the users home dir which is an auto/soft 
mounted dir and either not finding the file or getting an IO error causes 
dbus-daemon to seg fault? [if the answer is yes, then we have narrowed down 
the problem, and an appropriate bug needs to be put in the system about dbus 
as being a daemon it should never die with segfault.]



** strange results = gnome/netscape tried to create directories and got files.

>>>>
>>>> I have no problem just getting a ssh shell for an NFS
>>>> user, but trying to do the full blown GUI session
>>>> login, something always seems to go wrong, and all or part
>>>> of the expected interface never comes up.
>>>>
>>>> My solution is to avoid NFS like the plague - it always
>>>> seems to screw up if you try to write any data across
>>>> it. It can almost do reads reliably (except when it can't).

I can only agree with this comment if the client machines are soft mounting or 
they are working in a network that is incredibly busy. soft mounts will cause 
data loss in a busy network before hard mounts, but if you can ping flood -s 
1400 the server and not get any loss, then hard,intr UDP NFS should be still 
be _reasonably_ reliable (as NFS goes) and TCP NFS should be fine.

see the following thread entries
http://linux.kernel.org/pipermail/autofs/2004-April/001115.html
http://linux.kernel.org/pipermail/autofs/2004-April/001120.html
http://linux.kernel.org/pipermail/autofs/2004-April/001121.html

>>> I've never tried using an nfs mount as my home directory, but I do have an nfs 
>>> mount to my remote /home in fstab.  All important stuff is on there, so I 
>>> read and write files regularly.  I've had no problems whatsoever with this.
>> For years I ran a lab of 30-50 workstations all mounting /home from a
>> couple of NFS servers. This was on several generations of NFS in the
>> original Sun versions, and though we did consider alternatives such as
>> AFS or even Coda from time to time, none of them ever looked like
>> realistic alternatives in our environment. IIRC the problems tended to
>> be much more with NIS (Yellow Pages) than NFS.
>>
>> poc
>>
> I have been using NFS for many years for /home at least
> as long ago as Redhat 9
> Currently using
> autofs, NIS, NFS for /home on F9 x86-64 and F8 i386 and x86-64
> Often logged in on several different machines using the same account !
> No problems
> I just don't believe that NFS is the problem !!
> BUT
> I'm using kdm and not gdm
> and NetworkManager is not involved !!
> 

-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter