[plug] NIS - GDM

[Craig Ringer]

Luke Brown wrote:
> 
>>> Having some problems getting NIS users to login to a brand new redhat
>>> box. They get into the console fine and their home directories are
>>> readable and writable however logins stall after the gdm
>>> authenication stage in both kde and gnome. Nothing interested is
>>> written to the /var/log/messages /var/gdm logs
>>
>>
>> What about $HOME/.xsession-errors?
> 
> Yep, checked it, completely blank.
> Works ok in failsafe...

Interesting. What if you fire up a failsafe session (ie just an xterm) 
and then run "startkde" or "gnome-session" and watch the messages?

Have you made sure all the permissions are correct on their homedirs and 
that basic env vars like $HOME, $USER etc are being set correctly?

>> Nope, but I've had similar problems with LDAP authentication when
>> libpam_ldap was set up right but libnss_ldap wasn't.
 >
> doesnt seem to be an auth issue as if we type the password in wrong it
> gives a password error

PAM does much more than passwords, as does NSS. It also provides 
services to get user and session information, everything that used to be 
in /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow. You can be able to 
authenticate, but have other info not retrieving correctly, and this can 
cause all sorts of problems.