hi,

i rebooted my box and now the mythtv user can no longer log in. it comes up with a graphical login screen and a 30 second countdown. after 30 seconds it tries to login ( to mythtv i presume ). i get the standard x stippled grey background for about one second but nothing else, and then it comes back with the graphical login screen again. i get the same if i try to login manually ( i.e. user mythtv and password ). i can however successfully login as root and then su to mythtv and run mythfrontend.

i couldn't find a .profile or .xinitrc for the mythtv user ( i'm used to text based logins ) so beyond that i have no idea how the auto login works ( so i can't provide any logs), what it does, etc. if someone can point me in the right direction i can start to track it down. i'm running r5d1 which has been very stable for ages.

thanx.

Why did you reboot?

You can log in as root at the graphical login?

I suspect directory/file permissions as the cause. Did you edit a file in mythtv's home directory as root? Is /tmp set to 777?

Have you run df?

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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i shutdown to add a new tuner card - which appears to be a dud so now i need to work out how to remove that from the config too


logging in graphically as root is fine.


df is fine.


i'll check permissions on /tmp when i get home


i'll also check below ~mythtv for any non-mythtv owned files e.g. find ~mythtv ! -user mythtv | xargs ls -ld



i didn't "change" anything ( apart from running mythtv-setup to add the new card ). but i rebooted a few times ( no hard reboots, always shutdown -h now ) trying to work out my tuner issues so one of those may have corrupted the filesystem ?

it turns out it was a permissions issue. somehow /dev/null had been deleted and replaced by a normal file!! i suspect that a cron job that redirects standard output to /dev/null actually created the file, but i have yet to determine what deleted /dev/null in the first place. when /dev/null was (re)created as a file it of course had permissions of 644 which meant that the user mythtv could not write to it. presumably somewhere in the login process user mythtv also tries to redirect output to /dev/null, but since it can't write to it, the login fails. anyway, i deleted the file, and ran 'mknod null c 1 3' ( i hope that's correct - how can i check ? ) and 'chmod 666 null' in /dev. then i rebooted and things look back to normal.

That mknod command looks right to me. It matches the one on my KM box.

thanx for the confirmation.

i went through my shell history file to try to track down what happened to /dev/null. i am trying to record audio from my line-in connection ( nothing to do with mythtv ) and i was trying to get this working using 'arecord'. it turns out that if you use /dev/null as the output file for arecord it replaces the device file with a normal file! so all is fixed now, and i know to stay away from using /dev/null as an output file and just stick to redirecting standard output and standard error there.