empath forgets accounts 11.10

[M. van der Heide]

After a logout, all account information inside empathy is lost.empathy doesnot remebers the accounts
using 11.10

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Lapse of Reason (lapseofreason0)]

This is broken since the upgrade to oneiric. The account information in .mission-control/accounts/accounts.cfg is still present, but somehow empathy doesn't read it in nor does it save new accounts to it.

In my case the home folder is a symlink to another folder, could this be caused by that? Or maybe apparmor could be at fault, how could I check that?

Other people seem to be having the same problem:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1862190
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1851441
and possibly bugs #857519 and #857517 seem to be duplicates of this.

[Lapse of Reason (lapseofreason0)]

This is definitely caused by apparmor. As a workaround one can disable the telepathy apparmor profile by running

aa-disable usr.lib.telepathy

and then kill all processes related to telepathy (telepathy-logger, mission-control-5, ...).

[Lapse of Reason (lapseofreason0)]

I just confirmed that this bug was caused by the homedir being a symlink which is not handled correctly by apparmor.

Disabling apparmor for telepathy as explained above works, but a better solution is to add the real path of the home directories to the line starting with @{HOME} in /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home, e.g. if your real home directories reside in /exports/home/ change

@{HOME}=@{HOMEDIRS}/*/ /root/

to

@{HOME}=@{HOMEDIRS}/*/ /root/ /exports/home/*/

Hopefully this helps other people with the same problem.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

Thank you for taking time in filing the bug to make ubuntu better.
1).is this reproduce able?
2).if so than define steps to reproduce it?

[M. van der Heide (vdheide.net)]

Hi Muhammad,

Yes, the bug is reproducable.

Steps to reproduce:
- unmount the home-directory structure (umount /home)
- change the mount point of the home-directory to (for example) /differenthome
- remove the old mount point of the home-directory (rm /home)
- create the new mount point (mkdir /differenthome)
- create a symlink (ln -s /differenthome /home)
- mount the home-directory (mount /differenthome)
- logout and login again
- start empathy, add accounts
- logout and login again
- start empathy, the accounts are gone

This bug can be solved by adding the real home-directory (/differenthome) to the apparmor config file. This is perfectly described in the comment of Lapse of Reason.

Kind Regards,
Marco van der Heide

P.S. I forgot to thank you Lapse of Reason! But hereby a BIG THANKYOU!

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

there is no option to unmount the home directory and the file system never unmount form any where finally iam not be able to reproduce this bug and tell me your empathy version.

[M. van der Heide (vdheide.net)]

Hi Muhammad,

You are right that you cannot unmount the home directory when you are logged into the system.

I'll refrase the steps:
 - change the mount point of the home-directory to (for example) /differenthome (as root in the /etc/fstab and/or /etc/mnttab)
 - remove the old mount point of the home-directory (rm /home)
 - create the new mount point (mkdir /differenthome)
 - create a symlink (ln -s /differenthome /home)
 - logout and login again
 - start empathy, add accounts
 - logout and login again
 - start empathy, the accounts are gone

Kind Regards,
Marco van der Heide

[Stu (stu-axon)]

Just to confirm this happens to me too (I also moved my home directory to a different mount point)

[Franklin Strube (thedoc8786)]

This happened to me as well, and I believe the reason was due to Likewise-Open AD integration with a custom home directory (%H/%D/%U instead of the default %H/likewise-open/%D/%U).

I ran "sudo dpkg-reconfigure apparmor" and then specified "/home/DOMAINNAME/" as an additional homedir. I no longer see apparmor messages when I run "dmesg".

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

is the same bug happen when you shutdown and login again ?

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

This is actually from the apparmor profile in telepathy-mission-control-5, it looks like apparmor doesn't follow symlinks. I don't know much about apparmor, anyone have suggestions what we can do to fix this?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.