Things I Needed To Know (Fixing old mistake)

[chebe]

I'm referring to this entry: http://chebe.dreamwidth.org/6931.html

The information presented therein is incomplete at best, inaccurate and unhelpful at worst. Here's the update.

Problem:
Log in to your desktop (graphically, over vnc, etc) and nothing gnome related is loading properly. You see errors like:
"Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-oracle/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory 2: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-oracle/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory)"

You try gconftool-2 --spawn or similar, and receive the same error.

You look for those files, and they don't exist.

You edit /etc/syslog.conf to include user.* /var/log/user. You restart the syslog daemon /etc/init.d/syslog restart or service syslog restart. Reproduce the error, and open the log at /var/log/user, where you find:
"Mar 15 10:40:51 mycomputer gconfd (root-6666): Bad permissions 711 on directory /tmp/gconfd-root"

Solution:
ls -ahl /tmp and look for any gconfd-{user} files. These permissions need to be private. That would look like:
drwx------ 3 root root 4.0K Mar 15 10:53 gconfd-root
in case you were wondering.

To fix, chmod 700 /tmp/gconfd-{user}

Aside:
Annoyingly this seems to be a side-effect of installing a certain product in work. It happens every time. But now that I know how to fix it, it's all good.