vncserver errors with "wrong type or access mode of .vnc" when user does not own .vnc directory but is in the group owner

[Aaron Staley]

Scenario:

User A is a member of group G.

.vnc (inside user A's $HOME) is owned by other user B and group G.

when user A runs vncserver, it complains that "wrong type or access mode of .vnc", even though vncserver has permission to read and write every file within that directory (by virtue of group G). There appears to be no way to specify that vncserver stop complaining about this situation.

I realize that this is a very rare case. Specifically it applies to PiCloud, where the owner of files in user X's home directory are not necessarily user X. I realize this is not best practice, but it is necessary due to issues with our DFS and AUFS (see http://blog.picloud.com/2013/05/01/using-aufs-and-lxc-to-manage-dependencies-at-cloud-scale/ for an overview of what we are doing). Until vncserver, we had not run into an application that complained that its access was being derived from the group, not ownership.

If there is a way to disable this check, it'd be most helpful.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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