User login in Linux

[Samuel Mathew]

Vitally and other friends.
Thanks for the help till now, but it is not yet over...,
Yes, I can do a telnet and it goes the user's home directory. Eg. /home/samm.
Yes full permission to the home directory.
I deleted the .prof* files and then logged in through character. But now through the xwindow login, it doesn't go beyond the blank screen that comes after you enter the user name. So it seems to me that it is not having the xwindows initialisation files there... Am I right? Esp. since root logs in fine there. Now as I told you I have /home on a nfs mounted directory which is on a HP-UX. So when this user logs in on a linux machine I need to load the linux x window files. How do I do that? Or do you see another problem here?.
I think we are getting there.. slowly. I think if you can guide me to set up a user (not local but NIS user) on linux considering the fact that the NIS database is on HP-UX is the clue, I guess.
Thanks for the help.

[Paulo A G Fessel]

Ok, I see it now.

Do you have Gnome running on your HP-UX server? Do users log in directly onto that server?

Also, perhaps the data files generated by Gnome at HP-UX in a native HP-UX logon may be incompatible with those of Linux. For example, AFAIK PA-RISC is big-endian while Intel is low-endian, and thus binary files may be incompatible between versions.

Maybe it will be neccessary to check where your user is logging in your xinitrc script, and then set directories accordingly, creating one directory for HP-UX data and other for Linux data.

HTH
Paulo Fessel

[Samuel Mathew]

Ooh!. That went over my head....
Gnome is supposed to be running on HP Server? Because it is NIS server and Linux clients are there? That makes sense. Now how do I start that on HP-UX. I didn't ever envisage this to happen.
If you could explain to me the setting of the directories etc.. could have been very helpful.
Where do I look for xinitirc script and how it all interplay?
Well, I hope I can get some help this time..to move forward. It all makes sense
Sam

[Paulo A G Fessel]

No, Gnome doesn't need to be runing at HP-UX side. What I asked was if this user logs onto this HP-UX server and starts an X session there with Gnome, redirecting X output for his/her terminal.

If this happens, then it's possible that there's an .Xsession file on his/her home directory that refers actually to a X session started in HP-UX and not in Linux, and thus may not be compatible with your linux clients.

So, check if there is one (or more) of these files in user's home directory:

* .xsession
* .Xclients
* .xinitrc
* any .X* file with permissions such as 700 (minimum)

If it's the case, so you'll need to rewrite one of them to know whether you're connecting from Linux or HP-UX (an "uname -s" should take care of this). Based on this you could do a symlink to ~user/.gnome from one of two directories (e.g.: .gnome-Linux and .gnome-HP-UX) and them initiate the startup of X environment.

To be sure of this, try to rename the existing ~user/.gnome and ~user/.gnomerc files/directories. What does it happen?

(I don't use Gnome as I prefer KDE, but the way of storing local settings is pretty the same.)

HTH
Paulo Fessel

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

try two things

1) I suggest just delete ALL dot-files from user home directory


2) try to change NIS-user homedir to local dir.

[Samuel Mathew]

Thanks for the inputs. I found that if I create a home directory on the local drive, I am able to get in. But since this is a NIS environment, I need to have my home directory on the NIS server due to different reasons. Can anybody guide me as to how I can keep the /home/user directory on the NIS server and login and set up my GNOME desktop on the linux box. As I said earlier, my NIS server is a HP UX 10.20
HOpe to hear from you
Regards

[Dave Falloon]

On this machine what does the /etc/nsswitch.conf say? Can you attach it to a post.

One the linux machine from the text terminal, login as the user, is there any error messages?

I had trouble with NIS on linux when it was served from a FreeBSD box, specifically because the linux boxes were setup to use shadow passwords and the FreeBSD box was not exporting a shadow map in addition to the regular passwd map. Another problem I ran into with this is that your linux machine will not look for the shadow map at all unless there is an 'x' in the passwd map, anything else will make the client assume that the character is the hashed passwd.

Things you may need to do on your client depending on the OS and whatnot:

- edit the nsswitch.conf so that the client looks to nis first for passwd, hosts, automount, shadow, etc

- Move your /etc/auto.* files to /etc/auto.*.old so that they do now override your NIS files ( can also be accomplished with nsswitch.conf )

- I had to add +:::::: to /etc/passwd and +::: to /etc/group for a few older slackware boxes I have kept around for testing, you may have to do the same

- Make sure that the client machine can nfs mount the directory with the options found in the nis auto.master

- Make sure that the user is in the nis passwd file, ie ypcat passwd|grep user

- do the same for the shadow map

- Make sure the user can change their password, the error can give you clues as to whats wrong.


Here are some more problems I had when I had to set this up:

- I forgot to add the client machine into the netgroup that was allowed to mount the nfs drive

- Automount would not mount over a directory that had anything in it

- The rsize, wsize had to be increased, this was just for performance though

- I had to change from soft mounts to hard mounts after reading the NFS faq

I hope that helps,

Dave

[Dave Falloon]

I just reread what you had said earlier, if you can login just fine at the text term, then this definately is an X issue. What does this user try to automatically start when they log in?

After taking another look at your post with the xsession-errors I think the problem is related to this line:

could not get address for cyber

Is cyber a machine on your network?
Check your hosts file and all of the users login files for cyber, ie.

grep -r cyber /home//

I hope that helps,

Dave

[Samuel Mathew]

Dave,
I am going to try that. Thanks for the input. At least I have different strings to try,.
I have another problem.I had logged in and opened a gnome-terminal. IN the properties, I changed it to run a command, and the command was a 'cd' command. Because of that, the terminal doesn't come up anymore. It comes up and then closes. Any way of resetting the gnome-terminal properties, so that it will open as earlier. A quick response will be appreciated.
Regards
Sam

[David Otero · Accepted solution]

We had the same problem. We have found that setting the following environment variable solved the problem.

setenv GCONF_LOCAL_LOCKS 1