I have recently updated from F17 to F18 beta, and found the gdm login won't start if my nfs home directory is mounted. I have worked out that it is the gnome-shell --mode=gdm process that is hanging, as it doesn't die if I switch to the multi-user run level and I can't unmount the filesystem until the process is killed (with an INT signal).
I did a bit more debugging on this and it seems the hang happens when gnome-shell tries to access $HOME/.face in an NFS mounted home directory. gnome-shell shouldn't be assuming it can access any home directory, so if it does need to read .face there should be a timeout on the request to stop gnome-shell hanging.
(In reply to comment #1) > gnome-shell shouldn't be assuming it can access any home directory Yes, and I wonder why it is trying to do so - gnome-shell is supposed to get the user avatar from accountsservice, which copies whatever image is configured to /var/lib/AccountsService/$USER precisely because $HOME might not be available from the login screen.
This seems to have started working again. Has gnome-shell been patched to fix it?
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