Bug 104735

Summary:	gconfd has some very bad error handling.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux Beta	Reporter:	Bill Nottingham <notting>
Component:	GConf2	Assignee:	Mark McLoughlin <markmc>
Status:	CLOSED DEFERRED	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	beta2	CC:	rvokal
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2003-10-04 05:47:51 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Bill Nottingham 2003-09-19 22:44:59 UTC

For a period of a couple weeks on one of my crash boxes, every time I logged in,
I had no configuration, a pile of error dialogs, and *no* fonts (i.e., all the
dialogs were blank.)

The cause of this was:

Sep 19 18:18:02 apone gconfd (notting-1894): Failed to get lock for daemon,
exiting: Failed to lock '/home/devel/notting/tmp/gconfd-notting/lock/ior': probably
another process has the lock, or your operating system has NFS file locking
misconfigured (Resource temporarily unavailable)

i.e., gconfd had an error when starting, and then *exited*, with no user-visible
error message. Shouldn't there be some sort of error message printed to the user
so they can have some help debugging the problem?

Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2003-09-19 22:51:17 UTC

gconfd doesn't have an X connection, how can it display a dialog?
it logs the exact error to syslog, you just have to look... ;-)

All the apps _did_ display a dialog...

gconf-sanity-check-2 should have been run at login and should have detected this
error, also. If that didn't happen we could check why.

Assuming the problem was a stale lock file.

Comment 2 Bill Nottingham 2003-09-19 22:53:55 UTC

Yes, but the dialogs are completely useless when you have no fonts.

Does gconf-sanity-check-2 print any messages? Or log anything?

Comment 3 Havoc Pennington 2003-09-19 23:05:54 UTC

sanity-check-2 opens a dialog if there's a DISPLAY otherwise prints to stderr.

If there's no fonts that's not something gconf can fix, maybe
gnome-settings-daemon needs to verify that the setting is present, and if not
have an emergency fallback.

Comment 4 Bill Nottingham 2003-09-19 23:11:57 UTC

sanity-check-2 did not open a dialog, apparently.

Comment 5 Bill Nottingham 2003-09-26 22:18:29 UTC

It's back in this state again if you want to play.

Comment 6 Havoc Pennington 2003-10-04 05:47:51 UTC

I think the fixes here are:
 - make gnome-settings-daemon etc. have sanity checks on font size
 - don't use a TMPDIR on NFS ;-) you are breaking my workaround-nfs-locking-sucks
   hack
 - more pervasive gconf fixes, http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html

So closing this particular bug.