Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 75120
X11 startup hangs if home on NFS mount
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:47:09 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: When a user's home directory is located on a NIS mounted file system, starting up the X server/desktop will cause a blank screen with a curser icon. Startup will never completes. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.mount a NFS directory using NIS. 2.create a new user, placing its home directory on the NIS server. 3.log out, then re-login as the new user. 4. execute a "startx" if needed (not logging in graphical mode). Actual Results: From a graphical login, a blank blue screen with an arrow mouse pointer. From a "startx", a black screen with a "X" mouse pointer. Expected Results: The desktop should come up. Additional info: No errors in X log. No errors in system log. Happens on both SMP and UP IA32 P4 systems. NFS server is a RH linux 7.2 system (Dell 6300).
Sorry about typo; should be "NFS mounted directory". Also, we hard-mount, not automount, the file system for the test.
Is anything else NFS mounted? Could you provide the output of the mount command showing all mount points?
I'm doing NFS /home with 8.0 and no problems. What else is NFS mounted. What happens if you do: X :0 & (switch to text mode) DISPLAY=:0 xterm in the xterm Xnest :1 DISPLAY=:1 gnome-session - that will firstly test basic X stuff, then let you see the session start up both text and graphics at once
Please note, that /tmp must not be on NFS.
Followed the proceedure, but.... at "Xnest :1", the graphic display reset to a blank grey screen with a "x" mouse curser. No window was available/accessable to start the gnome session. So, I swithed to another virtual terminal, logged in as the same test user, and issued the "DISPLAY=:1 gnome-session" command from there. At which time, nothing happened (except the prompt did not come back, since it was pending the command completeion). Switching to the graphic display shows the same blank screen with a mouse curser.
Further info: Our main server (the one that fails) is RH 7.1, not 7.2. Tested with home directories mounted from RH 7.3, Irix 6.5.15, and Solaris 5.6 systems; all work (although the RH 7.3 system starts slowest despite being on the most powerful computer).
Starting "Xnest :1" is doing what is expected. You should get a stipple patterned background with an X cursor. No clients should be started since no clients were requested to be started. I'm unable to reproduce the problem you are describing. Alan has mentioned it works for him ok also, and I've had 2 others confirm it works for them too. I must conclude that you're either misconfiguring something, or you aren't doing things 100% correctly. This sounds like more of a technical support issue than a bug to me. Please try the xpert@xfree86.org mailing list for configuration/usage assistance. Closing bug 'WORKSFORME'