gdm and missing home directories

[Havoc Pennington]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 01:12:27PM -0400, Jack Neely wrote: 
> Does anyone know of a way I can make this work? 

You'd have to patch gdm and/or our gdm setup, I would think.  George
Lebl can probably help you figure out what to change...

My guess is that gdm works OK and the issue is that gnome-session or
other key apps puke if they can't write to homedir.  Or at least that
if gdm were fixed, you'd see this issue.

So it may come down to fixing whatever bugs in gnome-session
etc. cause that; which is worthwile since the "hard drive is full"
case triggers the same bugs.

If you get the desktop working right without being able to write to
disk, then using '/' for a homedir would actually allow web browsing
and such.

> Ideally, I would like to use mktemp to create a temp home dir
> instead of just using /.  The situation is the mentality that if
> your fileserver is down you should still be able to take an online
> test, surf the web, check your webmail, etc.  (Which I see nothing
> wrong with.)

The problem I'd expect here would be possible user data loss; they
save stuff, no error is reported, but the stuff gets trashed later.
Most apps will default to saving to the homedir...

If you just handle not having a writable homedir, on the other hand,
users will always get an error if they try to save something.  (In
addition to getting the "hard disk full" case solved as a side
effect.)

Havoc