Robotic Tendencies
The personal blog of Robert McQueen

May 14, 2005

Sigh

As a result of viewing an over-large jpg in Gimp, I ran out of disk space on ~ today whilst I was fiddling around trying to ssh to localhost and X forward something so I could run ethereal on lo and see what it was doing. The upshot of this was that my X auth cookies got munched when ssh tried to fiddle with them, so I was unable to open any new X clients and was forced to restart my session, so decided to try and make X listen on tcp to avoid the ssh hassle. In the process, I discovered two things:

  • Editing /etc/gdm/gdm.conf to remove -nolisten tcp from the X server command line is apparently not sufficient – it adds it on the end of the line anyway. I had to use Xnest in the end.
  • Rhythmbox has a thread which saves your playlists into an XML file. It makes a temporary filename, calls xmlSaveFormatFile to write the playlist to the temporary file, and then renames the temporary file to the original one, with absolutely no regard as to whether or not the previous function worked or not. So I’ve lost all of my Rhythmbox playlists. Again. One RC bug coming up.

Sigh.

Update: When going to update my todo list, I discovered that stickynotes-applet ate it. I am unamused. Rather than the active idiocy of making a temporary file and failing to check if it was successful before clobbering the original (did someone get distracted when writing that? a bee came into the room?), this is just sheer idleness. It fails to make a temporary file at all and just unleashes the same xmlSaveFormatFile on the only existing copy of all of your notes, giving me my 2nd RC bug of the day. Marvellous. Just because it says xml doesn’t mean it can never fail. I’m not trying to find them, they’re forcing themselves on me. Sorry, but there’s just no excuse for throwing my data away like that.

posted by ramcq @ 6:47 pm
Comments (3) .:. Trackback .:. Permalink

3 responses to “Sigh”

  1. Jay R. Wren says:

    On my ubuntu system my this gdm.conf patch/change turned on my TCP listening.

    — /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf 2005-04-28 21:58:05.000000000 -0400
    +++ /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf~ 2005-04-04 11:00:16.000000000 -0400
    @@ -183,7 +183,7 @@
    # Note: Anytime we find a -query or -indirect on the command line we do
    # not add a “-nolisten tcp”, as then the query just wouldn’t work, so
    # this setting only affects truly local sessions.
    -DisallowTCP=false
    +DisallowTCP=true
    # By default never place cookies if we “detect” NFS. We detect NFS
    # by detecting “root-squashing”. It seems bad practice to place
    # cookies on things that go over the network by default and thus we

  2. robot101 says:

    Ahh, thanks! That’s not present in my configuration file because it’s from an older version of gdm – and apparently it defaults to true. 🙂

  3. toresbe says:

    Also, if you run gdmconfig (as root) you get a nice “Always disallow TCP connections” checkbox 🙂

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