Things I Needed To Know (Fixing old mistake)

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.

Sticky

Welcome to the journal of my passions, interests, and hobbies.

This currently encompasses many things from Arduino, Lilypad, and wearable and fashionable tech of most descriptions, aspiring to something both functional and decorative. I like to sew and create costumes, but rarely post the results. Sometimes really fun things like paint/pigments with fancy chemical properties grab my attention. As well as all manner of crafty things, like jewelery and candle making. But mostly you'll find me waffling on about computer technologies, linux, software, and random tech. As well as projects spurred on by my hackerspace.

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