Comment 47 for bug 1197395

Aha, thanks for that. I've been trying to find a way to reproduce the bug and with the help of comment #46 I got one that worked for me:

sudo su -
pacmd list

This will result in an error message and the directory being owned by root, which screws up further connections.

This does not happen when trying to use the native/normal protocol (e g used by paplay or pactl), because that connection, I believe, uses the PULSE_SERVER x11 property ( see "xprop -root | grep PULSE_SERVER" ).

Pacmd goes straight ahead and calls pa_runtime_path which does a chown on the directory, and normal clients can do that in more unusual situations too, e g if there is no such x11 property.