[ale] Problems w/ users under CentOS 5.3 ....

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Tue Sep 1 20:41:48 EDT 2009


Ah. different version of gnome doesn't like the existing gnome
configuration (gnome is grumpy like that!).

Set the box to boot to runlevel 3. reboot. log in as the user with the
gnome problem at the text screen login prompt.

mv .gnome2 .gnome2.old
mv .gnome .gnome.old
mv .gnome2_private .gnome2_private.old

now run startx and X will start and gnome will recreate it's startup configs

set runlevel back to 5 in /etc/inittab and reboot.

If that fails, go back to runlevel 3 mode and check perm on the user .
files (check all files for that matter!) If selinux is set to
"enforcing targeted" (the default in CentOs 5.3) the selinux
attributes are likely missing in the old /home. Easiest fix is (as
root)
touch /.autorelabel
reboot
The next boot may take a bit of time (an extra 5-10 minutes depending
on speed) but the default selinux perms will be applied properly.

If you just don't care, edit /etc/selinux/config and change to
permissive from enforcing and to targeted from strict.

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 5:58 PM, William A. Mahaffey III<wam at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>
>
> .... New to the list, BTW, howdy. We have a P4 machine at work
> (work-station) which *was* running SuSE 9.3 32-bit, w/ KDE desktop for all
> users (actually, we all logged in as the boss's regular user, he likes it
> that way). It had an 80 GB WD HDD (reiserfs) mounted as /root & a 300 GB
> Seagate (ext3 fs) mounted as /home, both PATA, both several years old. The
> 80 GB croaked last week & we procured a replacement 80 GB SATA (mbd has both
> slots). We replaced the offending drive today & proceeded to install CentOS
> 5.3 32-bit. The install went OK, except for 1 little complexity. Since we
> had the 300 GB drive already set up & ready to go, I just created the new
> non-root user during the install w/ the same UID/GID as we were using before
> & let anaconda do whatever it does back there to finish things up. I also
> told it to mount that drive as /home. When I eventually tried to log in as
> the regular user, Gnome barfed, never got fully logged in, left itself in a
> catatonic state & I had to reboot the hard way. I logged back in as root &
> renamed the old directory & went through the 'users & groups' menu-dialog to
> delete & reinstall the regular user. This didn't work either, Gnome still
> barfs when I try to login the regular user. I went through several
> iterations of remove/reinstall that user & still nogo. Is this a known
> problem w/ Gnome or CentOS 5.n ? I gotta believe this is pilot error, but
> I'm stumped for now .... Any ideas how to extricate myself :-) ?
>
>
> --
>
> 	William A. Mahaffey III
>
>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
> 	 ever devised by man."
>                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
>
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>
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness


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