Process "gsettings" prevents logging in

[Henrik Heino]

When I try to login with my newly upgraded Ubuntu 12.04 (development branch), nothing happens. It just shows the same empty background that LightDm has.

I have found one solution to get myself logged: If I go to virtual console and display what processes I have, there are about six processes, and one of them is "gsettings". It does not consume any CPU resources, and when I kill it (with -3), the login process immediately continues and finally gets me logged in. To my knowledge, gsettings comes from package libglib2.0-bin and I have version 2.32.0-1ubuntu1 of it.

How to reproduce:
1 Try to log in.
2 Wait for several minutes to be sure it is stuck
3 Go to virtual console and killall -3 gsettings
4 Logging in immediately continues and finally completes in few seconds

Possible causes:
1 I'm using LDAP. My user information comes from LDAP-server, and this has caused lots of other logging problems, thanks to software developers not realizing the fact, that people use stuff like LDAP.
2 I had some problems when upgrading to 12.04, so that might have screwed things up. The funny thing is, that logging in works on my other PC, which has almost identical system and package configuration. So if you give me some hints, I can try to compare differences between them.

[Henrik Heino (henu)]

This morning I was able to log in without need to kill gsettings -process. I rebooted and tried again, but it got stuck so I needed to kill it that time.

[Allison Karlitskaya (desrt)]

Can you get a backtrace of the stuck gsettings process?

[Henrik Heino (henu)]

Uh, I'm not sure if I'm doing things right, but here is backtraces of both threads of gsettings. Tell me if I'm doing something wrong :)

[Allison Karlitskaya (desrt)]

Looking at these traces I have a hard time beleiving this is a glib/gsettings problem. It rather looks like some deadlock between fork() and the ldap nss module...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Mauro (mauro-simoni)]

Hi to all.
I use Ubuntu 12.04 and confirm that I have the same problem, I have to kill gsettings process to successfully log-in.
Also if I end my session and repeat the access the problem returns.

[Lisa Nelson (lisa50469)]

I have this same issue. Fresh install of 12.04 today. All updates. Connecting to a working ldap server.

I found a thread on ubuntu forums, and it said to rem out all the lines in /etc/X11/Xsession.c/90qt-a11y and install nscd.

By doing that, I can get logged into the ldap server, but don't get my desktop background.

I've got to get this resolved by next weekend as we are scheduled to install 18 new Ubuntu 12.04 ldap clients... I'd like to have them work! The current 11.10 clients are working perfectly.

[Lisa Nelson (lisa50469)]

OK, put the /etc/X11/Xsession.c/90qt-a11y file back to normal. Then installed libnss-ldapd (note the d) and restarted. I can logon to the ldap desktop, but I don't get the background image, and the dock acts strange.

The dock will launch firefox and terminal, but not my home directory. I can open links on the desktop to data on the ldap server, and they open and work fine. I logged off fine and got the lightdm logon screen again. Hope any of this helps...

[Olivier Cortès (olive)]

Hi All,

I think this bug is a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/at-spi2-core/+bug/870874

I'm not sure and I will not mark it as such, but symptoms seems the same: LDAP/NFS users, gsettings preventing session open with blackscreen. Various workarounds seem to work with mitigated results (installing nscd, removing /etc/X11/XSession.d/90qt-a11y…). For me, disabling the XSession.d script worked the first time, then not the subsequents. Did not try installing nscd yet, but caching LDAP results is not an option, it will just hide/mask an underlying network problem IMHO.

regards,
Olivier

[Jeff Davis (jdavis-n)]

In my case the libnss-ldapd appears to have fixed the problem... Now I need to investigate a bit more. it also removed nscd and replaced with nslcd. From what I'm reading so far libnss-ldapd is more robust and causes fewer issues. Would be curious if anyone else's experience is similar.

[Klaus Steinberger (klaus-steinberger)]

nslcd helps definitly