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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
mdrew has indicated that someone is experiencing this problem. We need to at least attach a decent explanation to this bug file.
Someone else can probably deal with this better than I.
We are pretty sure the PAM packages in the beta (roswell) resolve this issue; people are discussing now whether to do an errata, etc.
Need to verify that gdm is now copying the pwent structure instead of keeping a pointer to it
Fixed in rawhide