Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 834347
gnome-terminal through ssh session fails because of stale X server property
Last modified: 2013-08-01 00:07:29 EDT
Description of problem: Running gnome-terminal through ssh causes gnome-terminal to exit immediately. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-terminal-3.4.1.1-1.fc17.x86_64 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. ssh -Yf foohost gnome-terminal Actual results: Exits and no window ever appears Expected results: A gnome-terminal window showing up on my X display. Additional info: So, I figured out what the actual problem is. A stale property on my X server. Basically, I updated the software on foohost, and then rebooted it. After the reboot gnome-terminal would refuse to start. If I logged in with 'ssh -Y foohost' and ran 'gnome-terminal' it would simply exit silently. If I did 'gnome-terminal --disable-factory' I got this message: $ gnome-terminal --disable-factory (gnome-terminal:2941): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-griNv12JwP: Connection refused Failed to summon the GConf demon; exiting. No D-BUS daemon running I logged into the console X session on foohost and started a gnome-terminal there and it worked just fine. I then copied out the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable and set the same value in the ssh session. gnome-terminal again began to work. I started filling out this bug report. Then I had an epiphany and exited the X server (it's on an OS X laptop) and tried 'ssh -Yf foohost gnome-terminal' again. The X server auto-started like it's supposed to and a gnome-terminal window magically appeared. From this I conclude that gnome-terminal was trying to get the DBUS session information from a property on the X server, but that information was stale. This behavior is still sub-optimal, and it should be fixed. If that information appears to be invalid for whatever reason, a new dbus session should be created or some other similar measure.
Although I haven't been able to reproduce the issue reliably, this seems to resolve it when it occurs. dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-terminal This starts a new DBUS environment for gnome-terminal.
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Fedora 17 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-07-30. Fedora 17 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.