ydl2.3 questions: Nautilus and CUPS

[Rick Thomas]

Here's a guess at what's going on...  As a security feature, NFS translates
"root" on a client machine into "nobody" on the server machine (unless you
turn this feature off in the exports entry for that filesystem on the
server)  The relevant Gnome process is probably running as set-uid root,
which appears on the server as nobody, which does not have permissions to
write to your home directory.

If you reported it as a bug to the author/maintainer of the relevant Gnome
program, and s/he could figure out where the write was taking place, s/he
could program a check for the returned status from the failed write, and, if
appropriate,  try it again as the actual user.

Rick

> From: R Shapiro <rshapiro@bbn.com>
> This turned out to be an artifact of my home directory
> being a remote nfs mount.  Apparently the relevant gnome processes are
> unable to write to ~/.gconf and ~/.gconfd in that case, and that keeps
> nautilus from running (since it can't get the ior's to talk to the
> CORBA objects). I fixed it by making these two directories be symlinks
> to locations on a local file-system.  Don't ask me how I figured this
> one out...