[Bug 23002] GDM/NFS doesn't pick up my face

[Sebastien Bacher]

Public bug report changed:
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/23002

Comment:
upstream comments about that:

"Hmm, this problem is a bit tricky.  It probably isn't good for the daemon to
syslog the problem since some users might setup GDM on a network, turn on face
browsing and not care that some users faces don't show up.  If "IncludeAll" is
turned on, this could cause tons of messages to fill up the syslog when it
wouldn't necessarily be a problem.

You are right that it would be nice if gdmphotosetup let you know that your
$HOME directory is using NFS and it won't work.  However, all the logic for
checking if the home directory is local is in the daemon code and GDM doesn't
currently link any daemon code directly into the GUI code.  It would be a bit
messy to change this, and copying the code from the daemon to gdmphotosetup
would create nasty maintenance problems.

One way this could be fixed is to create a gdmflexiserver --command that allows
gdmphotosetup to ask the daemon "is this file/directory local" and it would
return yes/no.  Then gdmphotosetup could get the information from the daemon and
 display a dialog to let the user know that their face image will be ignored by
GDM.  However, this won't help users who set their face via the "About Me" 
capplet unless that code is also changed to also do the same thing.

However, this may be overkill.  The GDM manual is very clear about the fact
that face images are not supported over NIS/NFS.  I'd expect that most 
sysadmins would check the manual if the face browser isn't working and 
notice this.  To work around this, using the GlobalFaceDir to store user
images make sense.

There are some other options that we could explore.  We could add a gdm.conf
option "AllowFaceOverNFS" option that would be false by default.  It could
be set to true by sysadmins who want to turn it on - and then it would 
simply not do the "is_local" check for face images.  This might be the 
easiest solution.

I'd accept a patch to improve the behavior."

"Note, you may find that changing the RelaxPermissions in gdm.conf may make this
work better.  I haven't tested, but an idea."