Pam_Mount / Fedora 9 / Active Directory hell
- as with all things linux - documentation is sparse and scattered all over the place. And don’t give me this “oh, linux is open source and there’s documentation covering everything” crap. Yeah, that’s when things are working properly, and you’re using a common distro, with older builds of subcomponents. Once you get something new into the mix, something breaks or you get into the dependency spiral of death. Anyways, my most recent attempt at self flagellation with linux has been to use the newest version of pam_mount with Fedora 9. I have to admit that this time, the rpms for pam_mount actually worked and connecting to the AD server was not too bad. The hell part came when I logged in via gdm with an AD user, and the gnome desktop controls were missing , along with all the gconf permission denied errors. Logging in via text shell was ok, and mounting to the home directory on a samba server worked ok…. Only thing was the stupid gnome gdm login. Spent hours looking at various combinations of pam_mount.conf.xml and the smb.conf files, until I finally looked in /tmp . In /tmp, there were all these gconf* , orbit* , pulse*, virtual* files , and I just needed to delete them in order to log into gnome properly. yeesh….