gconfd becomes confused when $HOME is temporarily unavailable

[Timo Aaltonen]

Binary package hint: gconf

I'm testing kerberos with NFSv4, and this particular bug has been annoyed me for too long, sorry for not filing it earlier..

When your $HOME is on a network filesystem protected by kerberos, you lose all access priviledges when the kerberos ticket expires (usually 12h). So for instance if you lock your screen after the work hours, sometime in the night the apps don't have access to your $HOME anymore. When you unlock the screen, the ticket is refreshed and all is well (pam_krb deals with that, gnome-screensaver et al support that).

But, gconfd can become confused some time after the ticket has expired. I don't know what happens, but it doesn't regain the ability to use the $HOME when the ticket is refreshed, instead the app that needs to poke at the configuration spawns a new daemon. This obviously brings problems every time an app tries to save some setting, so you get an error-popup when you just hit the capslock ("No database available to save your configuration....").

Killing all the gconfd's is a workaround, but obviously not what I'm after :) Please let me know how to debug this further.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for your report, Timo is this still an issue with the hardy version of it?

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Yes it is, although I haven't used kerberized mounts for a while since there were other issues, but I'll start using them again to be able to debug this.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you send the bug upstream to bugzilla.gnome.org? you can reply to their comments since you get the issue

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for sending the bug to GNOME