[Leaplist] Problems w/ users under CentOS 5.3 ....

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 09/01/09 16:48, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> On 09/01/09 10:45, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
>> Oh, this is simple.  Reality:  you switched to a Fedora-based system
>> from a SuSE-based system, and an older one at that.  Expect issues.
>>
>> 1.  You were running an older version of SuSE, with an older GNOME
>>
>> Although you were using KDE, it's very likely the /etc/skel put in an
>> older GNOME profile that was unused, possible different.  Blow away
>> .gnome* and .gtk* (after backing them up) in one of your user's
>> directories.
>>
>> 2.  Fedora and SuSE based systems have different profile/bash settings
>>
>> You have users with /etc/skel from a SuSE-based system, and now
>> you're running a Fedora-based system.  You will likely need to modify
>> user .[bash_]profile and/or .bashrc as appropriate.  I'd start with the
>> one from /etc/skel on the new CentOS release.
>>
>>
>>   --
>> Bryan J  Smith           Professional, Technical Annoyance
>> Linked Profile:         http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>> Red Hat:  That 'other' American software company built on
>> open customer selection of options and value, instead of
>> controlled distribution channels of forced bundle and lock
>>
>
>
> I *did* start from the pristine CentOS after the 1st barf: I renamed 
> the offending home directory & let the 'users & groups' manager do its 
> thing setting up a brand new, box-stock 'stub' home directory (several 
> times). Still nogo. It seemed to me that somehow Gnome or something 
> else was/is remembering the original setup somehow even though I 
> (thought I) cleaned it out.
>
>


Soooooo tacky to self-reply, but for posterity here goes: the problem 
here turned out to be that we were trying to give user-process too much 
stack space. This caused the login shell to fail, eventually screwing 
the rest of the graphical login up. We have had (for years) a custom 
initialization file in /etc/profile.d with a line in it that said:

limit stackspace 512m

this worked AOK under SuSE 9.3 32-bit (as did 1536m), but not under 
CentOS 5.3 32-bit (we have 3 GB of RAM on the machine). When I commented 
that line out, the login went AOK, but we only have 10MB of stackspace. 
I seem to recall something about a PAE kernel being needed under RedHat 
to get a ~4 GB address space for user processes, so I will look into 
that tomorrow.


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.


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