On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 11:12:08AM -0400, dan moylan wrote:
> as root i did an adduser mem (wife) and rebooted.  again
> trying moylan, i was returned to the loging screen.  trying
> mem, it went off into never never land.  rebooted and went
> back in as root, all ok.
[...]
> what next?

Some more places to look: 

 /var/log/secure.log
 /var/log/auth.log
 ~/.xsession-errors

So, from what you described it sounds like you're successfully
authenticating, but your X session is dying prematurely.  I would
expect to see some errors logged in either the X server log (sounds
like you looked there already) or your .xsession-errors file.  If none
of the above turn up anything useful, you might also scan your home
directory for files you can't write to... it's possible that your
session is barfing because it can't write some state in your home
directory.  

To find files not owned by you, this should work:

  $ export USERID=`id -u`
  $ find $HOME ! -uid $USERID

Finding non-writable files can be done with:

  $ find $HOME ! -writable

It's not perfect, but should work well enough for you as long as your
files are local and not on some "weird" file system.

Also, IIRC, I somewhat recently ran into some behavior regarding
permissions on mountpoints that surprised me, though in typical
fashion I don't recall the details.  One of your messages made it
sound like your home directory is mounted directly on a mount point.
If that's the case, I might also take a look at the mount point's
directory permissions both while it is mounted and is not mounted, and
make sure they are what you expect them to be.  

Hope that helps...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
-=-=-=-=-
This message is posted from an invalid address.  Replying to it will result in
undeliverable mail due to spam prevention.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Reply via email to