Nautilus desktop filling up with fictitious icons (Fedora 9)

[Neil Bird]

   A colleague here has had a fresh install of Fedora 9 for a while, and the 
only remaining issue he has is that, after being logged in for a while, he 
starts getting a an ever increasing slew of extra icons on his desktop that 
don't match devices or actual files in ~/Desktop.

   Now, these aren't *totally* fictitious;  it appears to be something to do 
with a '.snapshot' directory (or it's updates) that our network filer 
maintains on our NFS-shared home directories (containing hourly.0, .1, etc., 
nightly.0, etc.).  I don't believe there's anything special about this 
directory.

   Mostly, it seems that the icons that appear seem to be dirs. and files in 
in them (albeit skipping the 'hourly.0' level) such that the rogue icons 
appear to be from the home directory.

   We're not quite sure what causes this;  it may be the backup process 
occurring (once every few hours).  He *can* force a fictional '.snapshot' to 
appear on the desktop by inserting a USB stick.  When the stick's removed, 
.snapshot stays when the USB icon goes.

   'lshal' isn't showing anything untoward, and neither is 'mount'.  Logout 
and re-login clears the rogue icons, IIRC.


   It may be something to do with the LDAP-authenticated home dir. mounts 
(we've not seen any issues with this before, but F9 did have some problems 
when trying to use NetworkManager as that came up too late to access /home)

   We've seen odd things like the following in /var/log/messages (edited):

Aug 29 12:06:27 hostname hald: unmounted /dev/sdb1 from '/media/disk' on 
behalf of uid 1143
Aug 29 12:06:27 hostname gnome-keyring-daemon[2695]: removing removable 
location: volume_uuid_766C_D2DD
Aug 29 12:06:37 hostname kernel: usb 1-8: USB disconnect, address 4
Aug 29 12:06:38 hostname automount[2229]: st_expire: state 1 path /home
Aug 29 12:06:38 hostname automount[2229]: expire_proc: exp_proc = 3084909456 
path /home
Aug 29 12:06:38 hostname automount[2229]: expire_proc_indirect: expire 
/home/username/.snapshot/nightly.1/eonic199702-welcome_files
Aug 29 12:06:38 hostname automount[2229]: expire_proc_indirect: expire 
/home/username/.snapshot/nightly.1/database-migration
Aug 29 12:06:38 hostname automount[2229]: expire_proc_indirect: expire 
/home/username/.snapshot/nightly.1/iip_default_files
Aug 29 12:06:38 hostname automount[2229]: expire_proc_indirect: expire 
/home/username/.snapshot/nightly.1/iip_qanda_files
etc.


   What else can I 'ls'?  Where else does nautilus get its drive information 
from?

-- 
[neil at fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil at fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil at fnx ~]# exit