In December I asked if I should prefer RHEL 6.2 to 5.7. The answer was clearly yes; 5.7 is outdated. On equipment purchased recently from Pogo Linux, I've installed 6.2, using the "server" install image from the U.W.'s mirror, but selecting "workstation" from it. (There's a separate, much larger "workstation" install image on the mirror, which I didn't use. The explanation of difference between the install images is badly outdated on the UW's site and perhaps I made a bad choice.)
At this point I'm wondering if the version of 6.2 I ended up with is barely beta-test, or if I might have a hardware issue, or what. I'm an end-user and I don't have a lot of training in sysadmin. One symptom is that I've several times had sshd on the new machine refuse to honor passwordless login, after it did honor it. Without my changing anything, it starts behaving as if the permissions of /home/user, /home/user/.ssh, or authorized_keys were wrong. At least once, it then started honoring passwordless logins again after an hour or two. Without knowing much detail about ssh's inner workings, I would have thought that this was some curiosity with server key regeneration. But since mid-afternoon today, I've additionally received the following as the first line sent to stderr when attempting an ssh login: Could not chdir to home directory /home/billyk: Permission denied The permission of /home/billyk is 700 and the ownership is billyk:billyk. Whatever just gave that "chdir" error is perhaps that's why it's also not doing a passwordless login. However, I wonder if it's specifically an ssh problem at all. From the terminal of the new machine, some ordinary tasks such as starting gnome-terminal (inconsistently) fail because it doesn't immediately see the home directory. I needed to change the properties of the gnome terminal launch to --working-directory=~, which does work. This is obscure enough not to turn up any obvious clues by googling. How easily can I tell if it's a hardware issue -- or, is it pretty much clear that it couldn't be hardware? Billy
