Fedora 9: dbus problems with /home on nfs

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 13:07 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Monday 14 July 2008 12:47:25 Tom Horsley wrote:
> > On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:21:28 +0200
> >
> > David Jansen <jansen at strw.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
> > > Has anyone else seen this?
> >
> > I have noticed some kind of problem with logging in
> > via GDM when I use a user with an NFS home, but never
> > investigated exactly what the problem was because it
> > is usually only by accident that I try it.
> >
> > I have no problem just getting a ssh shell for an NFS
> > user, but trying to do the full blown GUI session
> > login, something always seems to go wrong, and all or part
> > of the expected interface never comes up.
> >
> > My solution is to avoid NFS like the plague - it always
> > seems to screw up if you try to write any data across
> > it. It can almost do reads reliably (except when it can't).
> 
> I've never tried using an nfs mount as my home directory, but I do have an nfs 
> mount to my remote /home in fstab.  All important stuff is on there, so I 
> read and write files regularly.  I've had no problems whatsoever with this.

For years I ran a lab of 30-50 workstations all mounting /home from a
couple of NFS servers. This was on several generations of NFS in the
original Sun versions, and though we did consider alternatives such as
AFS or even Coda from time to time, none of them ever looked like
realistic alternatives in our environment. IIRC the problems tended to
be much more with NIS (Yellow Pages) than NFS.

poc