Having Trouble With Gnome With A Samba Mounted home Directory

[David Minard]

To Whomever Can Help,

Back Ground:

	We're trying to set up labs of Red Hat Linux boxes for our 
students.  We're a bit concerned that if we use NFS to mount home 
directories, and they manage to get a root shell, they will be able 
to become anyother user, and wipe out that user's home directory and 
not be challenged by further password requests to get into those 
directories.  (It's easy to stop root from ferriting around in 
directories with NFS).  So, we decided to try to use SAMBA to mount 
the home directory of the user who logs into the Red Hat box.  SAMBA 
asks for a password, which is what we want.  That way if they get a 
root shell, to mount someone elses home directory, they have got to 
enter the password for that user...  It won't stop them, but it will 
slow them down.

	We tried automount but it did some rather strange things when 
it was asking for the user's password - we had to abandon that - for 
now.


The Problem:

	When a user logs in, and gets into their home directory via 
SAMBA, and then runs "startx", it crashes with the following errors:

"Xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/.Xauthority"

and then

"** WARNING **: Unable to lock ICE authority file: /home/.ICEauthority"

At this point X bails.


	Why I think it's a SAMBA problem, is because if I set up the 
box to use NFS to mount the home directory, when you use startx, it 
works perfectly.


	The Linux box is running 7.0 with security patches installed.
	The Samba server is running on a True64 box (OSF V4.01229), 
and the Samba server is: 2.07.


	If anyone can shed some light on this, could they reply to me 
directly (david at cit.uws.edu.au), as I don't want to be on the list? 
I've scoured the lists for anything that might relate, but haven't 
come across anything...

In anticipation,

-- 

David Minard,
Senior Systems Programmer,
School of Computing and Information Technology,
University of Western Sydney.

Phone      : 61 02 47 360155
Fax        : 61 02 47 360662
            : 61 02 47 360770
e-mail     : d.minard at cit.uws.edu.au

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