[ale] Problems w/ users under CentOS 5.3 ....

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 09/01/09 21:17, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> On 09/01/09 19:41, Jim Kinney wrote:
>    
>> Ah. different version of gnome doesn't like the existing gnome
>> configuration (gnome is grumpy like that!).
>>
>> Set the box to boot to runlevel 3. reboot. log in as the user with the
>> gnome problem at the text screen login prompt.
>>
>> mv .gnome2 .gnome2.old
>> mv .gnome .gnome.old
>> mv .gnome2_private .gnome2_private.old
>>
>> now run startx and X will start and gnome will recreate it's startup configs
>>
>> set runlevel back to 5 in /etc/inittab and reboot.
>>
>> If that fails, go back to runlevel 3 mode and check perm on the user .
>> files (check all files for that matter!) If selinux is set to
>> "enforcing targeted" (the default in CentOs 5.3) the selinux
>> attributes are likely missing in the old /home. Easiest fix is (as
>> root)
>> touch /.autorelabel
>> reboot
>> The next boot may take a bit of time (an extra 5-10 minutes depending
>> on speed) but the default selinux perms will be applied properly.
>>
>> If you just don't care, edit /etc/selinux/config and change to
>> permissive from enforcing and to targeted from strict.
>>
>>      
>
>
> Hmmmmm .... Question: Can I do that touch as 'touch /home/.autorelabel'
> to confine the damage&  time spent, or must it be /.autorelabel ? TIA ....
>    



For posterity: Yes, the touch *must* be /.autorelabel, 
/home/.autorelabel *doesn't* work. The login problem here turned out to 
be that we were trying to setup user processes w/ too much stack-space, 
which was causing the login shell to fail, eventually screwing 
everything else up. We had put our own custom initialization file in 
/etc/profile.d/ & had a line in there that said:

limit stackspace 512m

We have 3 GB of RAM on the machine & this worked OK under SuSE 9.3 
(32-bit), but apparently not under CentOS 5.3 32-bit. I seem to recall 
something about a PAE kernel being required for a ~4 GB user-process 
address space w/ RedHat, I will look into that tomorrow. For now, we are 
done here, thanks for all the pointers :-).


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.