[387] in athena10
Simulating an AFS outage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan D Reed)
Wed Aug 6 09:42:29 2008
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 09:41:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jonathan D Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: athena10@MIT.EDU
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0808060922020.13701@infinite-loop.mit.edu>
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I've been attempting to test what happens in the event of the user's AFS
homedir not being available. So far, it's not great:
After login, it will grind for a while, and then eventually report that my
home directory could not be found. It then asks if I want to log in
anyway with root (/) as my homedir (!), but says things are unlikely to
work unless I select a failsafe session. If I click "Yes", then get an
error about the ".dmrc" file being ignored. Then, I get the "Your session
lasted less than 10 seconds" error. Viewing xsession errors shows a bunch
of errors for being unable to create the standard Nautilus directories in
/mit/jdreed (Desktop, Templates, Public (namespace collision here?!),
Documents, Music, etc). seahorse-agent complains via libgnomevfs that it
can't create /mit/jdreed/.gnome2, and then the session fails.
So, I try again, and select a failsafe session (which is not intuitive).
My xsession still only lasts 10 seconds, and gnome-session complains about
being unable to create ~/.gnome2.
I also tried to use the "Secure remote connection" gdm option, but that
doesn't actually seem to do anything (it behaves identically to me
attempting to log in normally).
N.B. Simulating an AFS outage was accomplished by using iptables to send
all packets from my homedir's file server to the DROP target. If that's
not the correct way to do it, I'll happily retest.
I also tested this with my test account to ensure that there wasn't
anything weird with my account.
This kind of sucks. Is there any better way we can deal with this that
doesn't involve heavy customization of the login code? I'd like to see
one of the following:
- gdm says something like "Your AFS home directory is unavailable, please
try again later."
- gdm offers to give the user a tty session to athena.dialup
- Failsafe works correctly (see below)
And while we're at it, Failsafe itself seems a little broken. While it
didn't run .startup.X, it still seems to run .environment and .cshrc.mine.
At least, after logging in with failsafe, and opening a Terminal window,
all my aliases (from .cshrc.mine) are there, along with some environment
variables I set in .environment.
-Jon
