GDM/NFS doesn't pick up my face

[Crispin Flowerday]

I set my face in the "Login Photo" prefs dialog, and gdm (when set to a theme
that had a face browser) didn't pick it up. I believe that this is because my
home directory is mounted through NFS, but the "Login Photo" prefs dialog didn't
say that, and none of the gdm logs show that either (I looked at the code to
work it out).

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317745: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317745

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. Could you reply to the question of bug
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16033?

[Crispin Flowerday (crispin-flowerday-deactivatedaccount)]

Created an attachment (id=4270)
Syslog output with debugging enabled

From the syslog it appears that nothing is logged.

Looking at the code, in daemon/slave.c:get_facefile_from_home there is a bit at
the top saying "is (!is_local) return NULL". I believe that is the cause,
however something somewhere should complain.

My first thought would be that the "Login Photo" dialog would complain, and not
allow setting the face.

[Crispin Flowerday (crispin-flowerday-deactivatedaccount)]

Oh, I should have said, that syslog is output is from an "/etc/init.d/gdm start"
till the gdm is waiting for me to select a user from the face browser.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Right, that's probably due to that. I've forwarded the issue upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317745

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

upstream comments about that:

"Hmm, this problem is a bit tricky. It probably isn't good for the daemon to
syslog the problem since some users might setup GDM on a network, turn on face
browsing and not care that some users faces don't show up. If "IncludeAll" is
turned on, this could cause tons of messages to fill up the syslog when it
wouldn't necessarily be a problem.

You are right that it would be nice if gdmphotosetup let you know that your
$HOME directory is using NFS and it won't work. However, all the logic for
checking if the home directory is local is in the daemon code and GDM doesn't
currently link any daemon code directly into the GUI code. It would be a bit
messy to change this, and copying the code from the daemon to gdmphotosetup
would create nasty maintenance problems.

One way this could be fixed is to create a gdmflexiserver --command that allows
gdmphotosetup to ask the daemon "is this file/directory local" and it would
return yes/no. Then gdmphotosetup could get the information from the daemon and
 display a dialog to let the user know that their face image will be ignored by
GDM. However, this won't help users who set their face via the "About Me"
capplet unless that code is also changed to also do the same thing.

However, this may be overkill. The GDM manual is very clear about the fact
that face images are not supported over NIS/NFS. I'd expect that most
sysadmins would check the manual if the face browser isn't working and
notice this. To work around this, using the GlobalFaceDir to store user
images make sense.

There are some other options that we could explore. We could add a gdm.conf
option "AllowFaceOverNFS" option that would be false by default. It could
be set to true by sysadmins who want to turn it on - and then it would
simply not do the "is_local" check for face images. This might be the
easiest solution.

I'd accept a patch to improve the behavior."

"Note, you may find that changing the RelaxPermissions in gdm.conf may make this
work better. I haven't tested, but an idea."

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Did you try RelaxPermissions?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the old version of gdm has been replaced in jaunty and the new gdm doesn't handle the login photo the same way which deprecated this bug, closing it, you can open a new bug if you get similar issues in the new version though

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the new version is there since karmic not jaunty

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

to be clear it would be useful to try on karmic or lucid and open a new bug if you still have a similar issue