gnome-terminal problem

["Jay F Shachter" <jay m5 chicago il us>]

Esteemed Colleagues:

This is a recurring problem to which I have found no solution.  There
is no answer to be found among the search engines, nor has reading the
fabulous manual brought me any closer to a solution.  I hope that the
combined wisdom and experience of the readership of this mailing list
will yield an answer where none has hitherto been found.

This is the scenario: I login to m5, which is the computer on which I
do most of my work.  There are, however, other computers in the
Shachter Computer Labs, to which I distribute some of my work: norman,
nomad, vaal, landru, and roc.  Thus, I run chrome on norman, and gimp
on roc, and pidgin on nomad.  Each of those applications runs with
DISPLAY=m5:0 so they take their keyboard and mouse input from m5 and
draw on the m5 display, but some of the burden on the cpu and on the
memory of m5 is reduced, in exchange for which the Xorg server on m5
has to respond to clients communicating to it thru a TCP/IP socket
rather than thru a local Unix-domain socket, but this is a small price
to pay.  I also keep a gnome-terminal window up on each of those
remote computers, with DISPLAY=m5:0, so I can execute commands on each
of my remote computers without leaving my station in front of m5.

Now suppose one of these remote machines crashes, but m5 does not.
This happens relatively often, because m5 is on its own circuit
breaker, whereas the other computers share a circuit breaker with
other household applicances, and sometimes the electricity goes out on
that circuit breaker, while the electric supply to m5 is uninterrupted.  
This is, then, what happens, after the remote machine reboots, and I
want to re-connect to it:

 $ ssh nomad
 Warning: Permanently added 'nomad' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
 jay@nomad's password: 
 Last login: Tue Nov 20 15:47:03 2012 from m5
 [jay@nomad ~]$ export DISPLAY=m5:0
 [jay@nomad ~]$ gnome-terminal &
 [1] 2860
 [jay@nomad ~]$ Failed to get the session bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-VSgG90UqPG: Connection refused
 Falling back to non-factory mode.
 Failed to summon the GConf demon; exiting.  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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Failed to get connection to session: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-VSgG90UqPG: Connection refused)

 [1]+  Exit 1                  gnome-terminal


If nomad (or norman, or landru, or any other computer) crashes while
there is a gnome-terminal session running, displaying to m5:0, then I
cannot run gnome-terminal on that machine, displaying to m5:0, after
the remote machine reboots, unless I log out as "jay" from m5, and
then log in again.  This is inconvenient.  There must be a way to
clean up the traces of the previous, pre-crash gnome-terminal session
without logging out and then logging in again on m5.  What is the way?
Note that the way gdm is implemented, when you log out and then log in
again, the X server is killed and restarted.  So, it may be the
killing and the restarting of the X server that fixes the problem, or
it may be something else that happens when you log out and log in
using gdm.  Hopefully it is the latter, since killing and restarting
the X server means that I must kill and restart all my graphical
applications (e.g., chrome, pidgin, gimp, vide supra), which is
inconvenient.

Lest you be tempted by the obvious, I did indeed connect my browser to
http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information, but found none.

I thank you in advance for any and all replies.


			Jay F. Shachter
			6424 N Whipple St
			Chicago IL  60645-4111
				(1-773)7613784   landline
				(1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
				jay m5 chicago il us
				http://m5.chicago.il.us

			"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"