Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Thoughts/suggestions on the following appreciated, as I've drawn a blank search the forum:

Indigo2, IRIX 6.5.22m, only a root account (how it came to me last year, except I've applied patches and the .22 overlays). Yesterday I added a user via the System Manager GUI, no errors reported. Local account, tcsh shell, home directory at usr/people/[username] - nothing fancy.

Logout, log back in using the new account and the desktop looks incomplete and behaves oddly:

no Toolchest, icon for home directory
right-click over background does not bring up the Desktop menu
console open without any window furniture to move/resize the window
application-finder open, so I can open applications (tried clock and xclock) but cannot move the application's window
from application-finder I can launch various configuration utilities but changes do not seem to have any effect
"logout" at the console prompt closes the console but there is then no way to

I have tried copying .desktop-* and other config files from a "good" account (editing the home directory references and setting own/group/permissions appropriately), but get the same result.

Probably unrelated: after adding RAM (swap 8x16MB for 8x32MB), the status LED is unlit except for a brief orange glow during start-up. No green light, but the machine seems to work fine.

TIA,
Andrew

Maybe only the desktop daemon is not running. Open a shell window, get root privileges on this account and try:



And then logout and login again.

Titox wrote: Maybe only the desktop daemon is not running. Open a shell window, get root privileges on this account and try:

Code: Select all

chkconfig desktop on

And then logout and login again.

Are there separate chkconfig settings for each account? Desktop is fine for the root account, so the daemon is running for that - the entry in /etc/config/desktop is "on". Where will per-user settings, if there are separate ones, be stored?

Thanks for the suggestion,
Andrew

ajw99uk wrote: Are there separate chkconfig settings for each account?

I don't think so. If you read again what he wrote: "...get root privileges..."
to me, that implies that chkconfig is only used by the root user.
I might be wrong, I'm only a newbie when it comes to IRIX.

In my experience, this issue is usually caused by either permissions problems or misconfigured DNS settings.

tingo wrote:

ajw99uk wrote: Are there separate chkconfig settings for each account?

I don't think so. If you read again what he wrote: "...get root privileges..."
to me, that implies that chkconfig is only used by the root user.
I might be wrong, I'm only a newbie when it comes to IRIX.

Correct - chkconfig settings are system-wide. They are used to determine which system scripts are run when an IRIX system starts up and shuts down. Each chkconfig setting corresponds to a script in the /etc/init.d directory.

Maybe the System Manager doesn't creates the necessary files in the user directory. I have always created the users from EZSetup. EZSetup checks the integrity of files.

josehill wrote: In my experience, this issue is usually caused by either permissions problems or misconfigured DNS settings.

Thank you, good to know someone else has been there and fixed it!

It would be good to have a better idea of exactly what adding a user does behind the GUI dialogue boxes. The manual explains some of it, but not to the level I need to sort out the current problem. Pointers to which files I should be checking for permissions problems would be welcome. I'd have hoped that System Manager could set things right when adding a user but perhaps there is a "default profile" with (on my system) wrong permissions, which get carried across to the new home directory? However, there is very little in the new home directory, so perhaps the "default profile" (assuming there is one) has gone completely AWOL!

Not sure I follow why DNS would be an issue - local user on local system, and network access as root seems fine. Can one add users before setting up the network? (i.e. while the system is still "IRIS" and using the default standalone IP address)

Thanks again,
Andrew

Titox wrote: Maybe the System Manager doesn't creates the necessary files in the user directory. I have always created the users from EZSetup. EZSetup checks the integrity of files.

That would explain why I had no problem adding a user on the Fuel - used EZSetup for that, rather than System Manager. Thanks for the suggestion.

Andrew

DNS can be the problem, but with a bad DNS configuration the root desktop is also broken -I think?-

Titox wrote: DNS can be the problem, but with a bad DNS configuration the root desktop is also broken -I think?-

I think so too. Even the login window takes a long time to show up.

tingo wrote:

ajw99uk wrote: Are there separate chkconfig settings for each account?

I don't think so. If you read again what he wrote: "...get root privileges..."
to me, that implies that chkconfig is only used by the root user.

I was wondering if root privileges might be needed to set chkconfig for root in one place - /etc/config - and for other users in another place - perhaps $HOME/etc/config
In this way a non-privileged user cannot screw up settings that make the system inoperable for that user - he/she would have to ask an administrator to turn things on or off, but such settings would only affect that user.

But, like you, I had understood there is only one set of chkconfig entries determining what services are running for all users, as confirmed by other responses here. Given the range of things governed by chkconfig, a one-per-machine approach makes much more sense than a one-per-user - it's rather more fundamental than your browser favourites or choice of background or screensaver!

tingo wrote: I might be wrong, I'm only a newbie when it comes to IRIX.

Me too! but enjoying the learning process, with help from the forum.

Andrew

ajw99uk wrote: Indigo2, IRIX 6.5.22m, only a root account ( how it came to me

As you might be in the process of discovering, sometimes it's less headache to just save any licenses and clean install previously admin'd systems.

ajw99uk wrote: It would be good to have a better idea of exactly what adding a user does behind the GUI dialogue boxes. The manual explains some of it, but not to the level I need to sort out the current problem. Pointers to which files I should be checking for permissions problems would be welcome. I'd have hoped that System Manager could set things right when adding a user but perhaps there is a "default profile" with (on my system) wrong permissions, which get carried across to the new home directory? However, there is very little in the new home directory, so perhaps the "default profile" (assuming there is one) has gone completely AWOL!

Have you taken a look at the man pages for sysmgr , UserManager , and addUserAccount ? Those are the programs that actually run when you add new users through the System Managers, and their configuration files (listed in the man pages) control what is placed in a user's default "profile."

One tip, particularly since you are using a machine that was set up by someone else: there are many places where a system administrator might choose to customize a user's environment, and some of these may conflict with or override settings that are made by System Manager. For example, when a user starts a tcsh shell, as many as six tcsh configuration files might be read, but only two of those are initially written by System Manager's account creation process. For example, see viewtopic.php?p=56903#p56903

ajw99uk wrote: Not sure I follow why DNS would be an issue - local user on local system, and network access as root seems fine. Can one add users before setting up the network? (i.e. while the system is still "IRIS" and using the default standalone IP address)

I probably should have said "hostname" instead of DNS, but it's the same basic issue. The IRIX GUI keeps track of certain kinds of objects, including Desktop icons, using hostname information (or, in some cases, NIS or DNS information). In the dim ages of history, the idea was, in part, to make it easier to share objects, like CD-ROM drives, over a network. If the system is misconfigured, the Desktop gui might not be able to find everything and draw icons for things like CD-ROM drives, even if the CD-ROM drives are accessible via the command-line interface. I haven't thought about this stuff in a while, so I'm hazy on the details, but it used to be a reasonably common annoyance in older versions of IRIX, like 5.3. It's less of a problem of in IRIX 6.5. The key items in older IRIXs were things with names like Cadmin, objectserver, directoryserver, etc., but IIRC, only bits and pieces of them survive in IRIX 6.5. For 6.5, the key things to look up are the fm and fam programs.

Titox wrote: Maybe the System Manager doesn't creates the necessary files in the user directory. I have always created the users from EZSetup. EZSetup checks the integrity of files.

While EZsetup offers to configure a couple of Desktop settings that are not included in the standard set of System Manager prompts (e.g. cursor focus, Toolchest orientation), EZsetup and System Manager both use the same underlying commands and defaults to create new users. Indeed, one of the first things that many system admins do with new IRIX systems is to disable the EZsetup account and then either use the System Manager or automated methods to set up new user accounts. It is extremely unlikely that the choice of EZsetup vs System Manager is the source of the problem.

ajw99uk wrote: But, like you, I had understood there is only one set of chkconfig entries determining what services are running for all users, as confirmed by other responses here. Given the range of things governed by chkconfig, a one-per-machine approach makes much more sense than a one-per-user - it's rather more fundamental than your browser favourites or choice of background or screensaver!

Yes. General system-wide setup/configuration files tend to be found in the /etc directory (like the chkconfig and " run level " files), while user level customizations tend to be found in individual user directories.

ajw99uk wrote:

tingo wrote: I might be wrong, I'm only a newbie when it comes to IRIX.

Me too! but enjoying the learning process, with help from the forum.

Glad to hear that you are enjoying the process. Keep the questions coming!

recondas wrote:

ajw99uk wrote: Indigo2, IRIX 6.5.22m, only a root account ( how it came to me

As you might be in the process of discovering, sometimes it's less headache to just save any licenses and clean install previously admin'd systems.

Indeed. To the original poster, if you have the media available to perform a clean system installation, it might be much easier to backup your system (especially any license files for special software like compilers, added features, and third party tools), erase the drive by creating a new filesystem, and start from scratch.

josehill wrote:

recondas wrote:

ajw99uk wrote: Indigo2, IRIX 6.5.22m, only a root account ( how it came to me

As you might be in the process of discovering, sometimes it's less headache to just save any licenses and clean install previously admin'd systems.

Indeed. To the original poster, if you have the media available to perform a clean system installation, it might be much easier to backup your system (especially any license files for special software like compilers, added features, and third party tools), erase the drive by creating a new filesystem, and start from scratch.

Sadly not an option - my only resource is the 2GB disk that was in the machine when I bought it, now safely stored away.

Thanks for all the comments in your other post - man pages added to my reading list!

Andrew