[UFO Chicago] gnome-terminal problem

[Brian Sobolak]

On Tue, November 27, 2012 5:14 pm, Jay F Shachter wrote:
> Gentlemen:
>
> (I would write, "Ladies and Gentlemen", if there were any ladies in
> our little group, but there are none.  There are only men.  But you
> are, every one of you, in my eyes, a gentleman.)
>
> This is a recurring problem to which I have found no solution.  I
> have, in fact, mentioned it once before at one of our meetings, but I
> was given no answer, but, rather, I was told to seek my answer among
> the search engines.  There is, alas, no answer to be found among the
> search engines, nor has reading the fabulous manual brought me any
> closer to a solution.  I hope that the combined wisdom and experience
> of the readership of this mailing list will yield an answer where none
> has hitherto been found.
>
> This is the scenario: I login to m5, which is the computer on which I
> do most of my work.  There are, however, other computers in the
> Shachter Computer Labs, to which I distribute some of my work: norman,
> nomad, vaal, landru, and roc.  Thus, I run chrome on norman, and gimp
> on roc, and pidgin on nomad.  Each of those applications runs with
> DISPLAY=m5:0 so they take their keyboard and mouse input from m5 and
> draw on the m5 display, but some of the burden on the cpu and on the
> memory of m5 is reduced, in exchange for which the Xorg server on m5
> has to respond to clients communicating to it thru a TCP/IP socket
> rather than thru a local Unix-domain socket, but this is a small price
> to pay.  I also keep a gnome-terminal window up on each of those
> remote computers, with DISPLAY=m5:0, so I can execute commands on each
> of my remote computers without leaving my station in front of m5.
>
> Now suppose one of these remote machines crashes, but m5 does not.
> This happens relatively often, because m5 is on its own circuit
> breaker, whereas the other computers share a circuit breaker with
> other household applicances, and sometimes the electricity goes out on
> that circuit breaker, while the electric supply to m5 is uninterrupted.
> This is, then, what happens, after the remote machine reboots, and I
> want to re-connect to it:
>
>  $ ssh nomad
>  Warning: Permanently added 'nomad' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
>  jay at nomad's password:
>  Last login: Tue Nov 20 15:47:03 2012 from m5
>  [jay at nomad ~]$ export DISPLAY=m5:0
>  [jay at nomad ~]$ gnome-terminal &
>  [1] 2860
>  [jay at nomad ~]$ Failed to get the session bus: Failed to connect to socket
> /tmp/dbus-VSgG90UqPG: Connection refused
>  Falling back to non-factory mode.
>  Failed to summon the GConf demon; exiting.  Failed to contact
> configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable
> TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system
> crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -
> 1: Failed to get connection to session: Failed to connect to socket
> /tmp/dbus-VSgG90UqPG: Connection refused)
>
>  [1]+  Exit 1                  gnome-terminal
>
>
> If nomad (or norman, or landru, or any other computer) crashes while
> there is a gnome-terminal session running, displaying to m5:0, then I
> cannot run gnome-terminal on that machine, displaying to m5:0, after
> the remote machine reboots, unless I log out as "jay" from m5, and
> then log in again.  This is inconvenient.  There must be a way to
> clean up the traces of the previous, pre-crash gnome-terminal session
> without logging out and then logging in again on m5.  What is the way?
> (Lest you be tempted by the obvious, I did indeed connect my browser
> to http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information, but found none.)
> I thank you in advance for any and all replies.
>

I think the best answer would be to improve the power. It doesn't seem
appropriate to have computers crashing because of bad circuits.

Dumb questions, which may or may not help:

- Do you have to actually reboot, or can you just log off and log on again?

- Have you investigated to see if there is still a socket open, and looked
at ways to "flush" those?  (I'm only vaguely aware of what I'm talking
about here, but if it thinks there is a connection that is stale,
"flushing" the connections might help.

- Have you tried posting this message to one of the Gnome lists?

brian


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