More on - problems after a removal of the lock file

["Maria Capellades" <Capellades eumetsat de>]

Dear gconf-list people,

Two more things regarding the problem described below:

1.- Although I thought this problem will affect only my account, it
turns out that the other users of this Linux machine also got affected.
They could not login properly with Gnome as default. Interestingly
enough (although might be completely unrelated), the following directory
in each user's home ~/.gnome2/panel2.d had the permissions set wrong and
user could not write to it.

2.- The way we solve the problem was by sacrificing some customization
and preferences settings for all users by asking everyone to delete the
following directories in their home:
.gconf
.gconfd
.gnome
.gnome2
.metacity
.nautilus

This solved the problem as all these got recreated. 

I still would ike to know how (or perhaps whether) the problem below
got to affect other user's account. 

Regards,

Maria


_____________________________
Dear Gnome Project,

I had a problem with my firefox program. In an attempt to solve it -
via the always ignorant trial-and-error way - I removed the lock file
from my .gconf directory - gconfd was running at the time. This seems to
be an irrecoverable situation. My linux machine's name is "concorde".

I usually log in remotely into my linux machine via cygwin from my
windows PC. After having foolishly removed the
~/.gconf/%gconf-xml-backend.lock file, I cannot log in my account with
gnome as default anymore. The session crashes, and cygwin's Xwin also
crashes and cannot be restarted. This is the detailed info:

    ****  Exact error messages from any applications.
None can be seen since the Xsession when trying to login remotely to my
account is totally corrupt. Login in with KDE as default and then trying
to run gconftool-2 gives the following error:
"> gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome
>Failure listing entries in `/desktop/gnome': Failed to contact
configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable
TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system
crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information.
(Details -  1: IOR file '/home/capella/.gconfd/lock/ior' not opened
successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory 2: IOR file
'/home/capella/.gconfd/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd
located: No such file or directory)"

    ***** Exact version of GConf 1 and GConf 2 that you have
installed.
2.2.0

    ****** Output of ps jaxwww | grep gconf.
12274 12496 12495 12227 pts/6    12495 S      162   0:00 grep gconf

    ****** Output of gconf-sanity-check-1 or gconf-sanity-check-2 if
any.
Nothing comes as output of gconf-sanity-check-1. There is no
gconf-sanity-check-2

    ******* What operating system are you using, and what version of
it.
Red Hat Linux 9
>uname -a
>Linux concorde 2.4.20-8smp #1 SMP Thu Mar 13 17:45:54 EST 2003 i686
i686 i386 GNU/Linux
    
    ******* What appears in the user.* syslog (see above for how to
turn on user.* syslog).
Aug 30 17:46:15 concorde gconfd (capella-13896): starting (version
2.2.0), pid 13896 user 'capella'
Aug 30 17:46:15 concorde gconfd (capella-13896): Bad permissions 755 on
dir /home/capella/.gconfd
Aug 30 17:46:15 concorde gconfd (capella-13896): Failed to get lock for
daemon, exiting: Directory /home/capella/.gconfd has a problem, gconfd
can't use it
Aug 30 17:46:15 concorde gconfd (capella-13898): starting (version
2.2.0), pid 13898 user 'capella'
Aug 30 17:46:15 concorde gconfd (capella-13898): Bad permissions 755 on
dir /home/capella/.gconfd
Aug 30 17:46:15 concorde gconfd (capella-13898): Failed to get lock for
daemon, exiting: Directory /home/capella/.gconfd has a problem, gconfd
can't use it
Aug 30 17:46:19 concorde gdm(pam_unix)[12642]: session closed for user
capella
Aug 30 17:46:19 concorde gdm[12642]: gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal
X error - Restarting 163.165.203.234:0




Maria Angeles Capellades, PhD
Scientific Software Engineer
Eumetsat - Am Kavalleriesand 31
D-64295 Darmstadt. Germany.
Phone: 49-6151-807886