On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 11:27:57PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> In message <20041013213801.GA14914@olib.org>, Richard Rauch writes:
> >Some points to add to this thread:
> >
> >I rarely see the errors you describe.
> >
> >I do not recall seeing them (ever) with firefox, though the only way
> >I can run firefox is on i386...which means ssh to an i386 from AMD64.
> >So I don't use firefox often.
> >
> >I *have* seen it, sometimes, with other programs.
> >
> >I have never found it to consistantly happen.  Usually if a program fails,
> >I can get it to work by just retrying it.
> >
> >Correlating to Nathan's comment: My homedirs are on NFS (except when I
> >ssh to the file server which is the only machine from which I have run
> >firefox...(^&).
> 
> Is there a setuid program involved anywhere?  In most NFS configurations,
> root wouldn't have privileges over NFS, which means that the program 
> couldn't read the proper .Xauthority file.

I don't believe there's a setuid program involved, but in any event, in
the NFS configuration for my diskless workstation, root does in fact
have privileges over NFS, so that can't be what's going on.

Besides, the failure is intermittent.  It's truly bizarre.  All I can
think of is something to do with, perhaps, stale NFS file handles and
fd passing or inheritance...

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud