Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 78553
FAM broken by design?
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:04 EDT
Description of Problem: I think that this is a known problem but I don't see it documented any where so I will here or at an upstream point if someone will point me in the right direction. FAM assumes that it can read your home directory (or whatever directory) as a daemon run by root. This doesn't work on all filesystems and causes some interesting problems. With AFS the user must be authenticated and have the proper access rights to be able to read in a directory and in all cases this does not include root. The root user translates to system:anyuser which is normally given no access rights to home directories. I assume that similar issues would happen with other file systems. Shouldn't this be a daemon started as the user who's files are to be monitored? On Red Hat Linux 7.3 this causes desktop icons to simply dissapear when clicked on among other oddities. Disabling FAM seems to work around the issue pretty well but applications (gedit) complain pretty bitterly and I have the feeling that applications will become more dependant on this in the future. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fam-2.6.8-4 fam-2.6.7-6 I guess I should just say all versions. How Reproducible: Always.
Yes. This is another reason why FAM is the suck(tm). It's not really fixable with the current implementation though. I have long wanted to do a rewrite of fam that is per-user and sane. I still hope that I may some day have time to do it. I'm marking this WONTFIX though, because in the context of fam it's unfixable.