Notes on GConf

The following is based on feedback I sent to SuSE after experiencing some GConf-over-NFS problems at home that may or may not be specific to the particular SuSE distributions involved. See also the GConf configuration system page, which is where I started (as the error popups told me). -- rgr, 24-Apr-04.

Home : Linux resources : GConf

Problems in my home configuration

I had two problems getting GConf to work over NFS using the following configuration:

Client:
Server:

Problem 1: /etc/hosts.allow entry required for statd on client

I skipped the http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/08/cihlarov_gnome-nfs.html page workaround (besides not finding it in time) because I wanted a single shared state for all machines, taking the lockd route instead. After some trial and error, I discovered that I needed to add the line: 
	statd : nfs-server-host-name : ALLOW
to the /etc/hosts.allow file on the client. Seems to me this ought to be documented somewhere.

Problem 2: Missing/misspelled directories on client

Once the above problem was solved, I got the following error: 
    rogers@alp> gconf-sanity-check-1
    Please contact your system administrator to resolve the following problem:
    Could not resolve the address
    "xml:readonly:/etc/opt/gnome/gconf/gconf.xml.mandantory" in the
    configuration file "/etc/opt/gnome/gconf/1/path": Failed: 
     Could not make directory
     `/etc/opt/gnome/gconf/gconf.xml.mandantory': Permission denied 
    rogers@alp>
This was fixed by symlinking /etc/opt/gnome/gconf/gconf.xml.mandantory (note misspelling) to /etc/opt/gnome/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory on the client (as root, of course). Since then, I determined that the misspelling lies in the /etc/opt/gnome/gconf/1/path file, so I'm sure you'll want to fix it there. Then I got: 
    rogers@alp> gconf-sanity-check-1
    Please contact your system administrator to resolve the following problem:
    Could not resolve the address
    "xml:readonly:/etc/opt/gnome/.gconf" in the configuration file
    "/etc/opt/gnome/gconf/1/path": Failed:
     Could not make directory `/etc/opt/gnome/.gconf': Permission denied
    rogers@alp> gconf-sanity-check-1
Creating this directory on the client (again, as root) got me to the point where I could start gnumeric without warnings.

Problems at work

At work I had the same /etc/opt/gnome/gconf/1/path faiiure, and similar NFS locking problems, on a slightly different configuration:

Client:
Server:
The key difference is that the client had nfs-server installed, and not nfs-utils, and nfs-utils is what provides the nfslock service on the client. (I assume this is a byproduct of upgrading, rather than doing a fresh install.) Uninstalling nfs-server (which conflicts with nfs-utils), installing nfs-utils, and doing "/etc/init.d/nfslock start" fixed the problem.

Bob Rogers <rogers@rgrjr.dyndns.org>
$Id: gconf.html 103 2005-01-10 02:58:14Z rogers $