Cannot log in if root cannot read home directory

[Nick Sillito]

My system stores uses nfs to share /home across the network. When I upgraded to 11.10, certain users could not log in via Light DM (but could log in with a simple text terminal).
When I changed the users' home directory to a file on the local machine, they were able to log in fine.
Looking at the permissions on the users home directory, all those with rwx-r-xr-x were able to log in ok, all those with rwx------ were not able to log in.
I changed the permissions on one home directory to rwxr-xr-x and that user was able to log in.

I assume that Light DM needs to be able to read something from the user's home file, and it requests data as root. Because nfs does not allow root access, it fails.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Ian Morris (ipm)]

I seem to have the same problem although in my case /home/xxxx is auto-mounted using nfs4 and kerberos authentication. Changing the attributes of the home directory to rwx--x--x was sufficient and not uncommon for users who have ~/public_html anyway.