Bug 5911 - Disturbing syslog messages on gdm exit
Summary: Disturbing syslog messages on gdm exit
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: gdm
Version: 6.1
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Havoc Pennington
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 1999-10-13 17:29 UTC by Patrick J. LoPresti
Modified: 2008-05-01 15:37 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2001-11-16 20:26:52 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Patrick J. LoPresti 1999-10-13 17:29:14 UTC
Every time I log out of my GNOME session, I get the
following messages logged to /var/log/messages:


  Oct 13 11:26:47 egghead gdm[6403]: gdm_auth_user_remove:
/u/patl is not owned by uid 0.
  Oct 13 11:26:47 egghead gdm[6403]: gdm_auth_user_remove:
Ignoring suspiciously looking cookie file
/u/patl/.Xauthority


Browsing the source code for gdm, I conclude that this is
some weird gdm bug; that "uid 0" is the user who it wants to
have owning my home directory, which ought to be *my* user
id, not root's.

I do not know why this is happening, but it is pretty
disturbing.  I assume gdm manipulates my .Xauthority file
for a reason; this bug is preventing that from happening.

Comment 1 Patrick J. LoPresti 1999-10-13 17:46:59 UTC
Addenddum: I do own my home directory, and my user id is not 0.  (I
just double checked these.)

Also, similar messages are *not* logged by gdm_user_auth_add at the
beginning of the session; I only get messages from
gdm_user_auth_remove.

Let me know if you need assistance to reproduce this problem.

Comment 2 mkp 1999-11-01 19:15:59 UTC
I didn't operate on a copy of the pwent structure and apparently PAM
messes with it. I.e. we get a random userid when the session is about
to be terminated.

This bug has been fixed in my current tree and will be in beta5.

Comment 3 Elliot Lee 1999-11-17 21:39:59 UTC
Author has indicated this will be fixed in a future upstream release. Since its
impact appears to be merely cosmetic, I'm closing this bug report.

Comment 4 Peter L. Thomas 2001-08-22 16:29:02 UTC
We are receiving these error messages--accompanied by the extremely "non-
cosmetic" behavior of gdm erroring out with an 0x10.  This is happening on a 
RH6.2 and two RH7.0 boxes on an infrequent-but-annoying basis.

Comment 5 Elliot Lee 2001-09-07 19:28:34 UTC
mdrew has indicated that someone is experiencing this problem. We need to at
least attach a decent explanation to this bug file.

Comment 6 Elliot Lee 2001-09-10 23:43:15 UTC
Someone else can probably deal with this better than I.

Comment 7 Havoc Pennington 2001-09-11 15:16:08 UTC
We are pretty sure the PAM packages in the beta (roswell) resolve this issue; 
people are discussing now whether to do an errata, etc.

Comment 8 Havoc Pennington 2001-11-16 20:26:44 UTC
Need to verify that gdm is now copying the pwent structure instead of keeping a
pointer to it

Comment 9 Havoc Pennington 2002-02-12 00:04:36 UTC
Fixed in rawhide


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