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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) On two systems I have, when ever the nameserver specified in Network Configuration is down or unavailable for whatever reason (such as flaky network), it is near impossible to login as a normal user. It just accepts the id/password, tries to start Gnome, but then kicks you back to the login screen. On next reboot, you get the error message "According to gdm.pid in /var/run, gdm was already running (#) but was mysteriously murdered." The screen will flicker and this message will repeat until you reboot. When rebooting, 'Stopping X Font System' fails. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Add a nameserver 2. Try to make the nameserver unavailable for whatever reason (disconnected network cable, nameserver off, etc.) 3. Try to login several times 4. Reboot Expected Results: Should have been able to access desktop, graphical login screen should have come up again after reboot.
I forgot to mention that these problems linger even after the nameserver comes back up.
X simply does not work reasonably when you can't "ping `hostname`" - if you can't resolve your hostname, the system is going to be screwed. Newer gdm in rawhide will just get stuck in a DNS query instead of getting into this hosed state though. Still, even if you could log in GNOME and X wouldn't work right.