On 2011-09-12, at 12:51 PM, Steve Jahl wrote:

>>>> 
>>>> I know I have successfully set up LDAP *and* NFS, because I can log in
>>>> remotely with SSH as well as on a terminal.  However, when I try to log
>>> in
>>>> with GDM or XDM, it will accept my password, black out the screen, and
>>>> then return to either GDM or XDM.  I *can*, however, log in with a local
>>>> account.
> 
> In my experience, if there's an auth failure, GDM prints a warning on the login window, rather than blacking out the screen, and dumping you back to a login window. Seeing as you can auth via other methods, I don't think this is the case. You can probably find some info as to what's happening in the /var/log/gdm/* log files.
> 
> To me, it sounds to me like there's a crash somewhere in your gnome session. Is there any relevant information in the ldap user's ~/.xsession-errors file?
> 
> I've also seen this happen if there's a corrupted session state file (~/.gnome2/session). You can try removing that, and see if if clears anything up for you.
> 
> -Steve


Also, here's the gdm greeter log:

===========
** (<unknown>:2302): DEBUG: Client registered with session manager: /org/gnome/SessionManager/Client1
** (process:2324): DEBUG: Greeter session pid=2324 display=:0.0 xauthority=/var/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm-cWnJhZ/database

(polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2322): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `_PolkitError'

(polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2322): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
Failed to play sound: File or data not found
gdm-simple-greeter[2324]: Gtk-WARNING: gtkwidget.c:5460: widget not within a GtkWindow
Window manager warning: Buggy client sent a _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW message with a timestamp of 0 for 0x220002b (Login Wind)
Window manager warning: meta_window_activate called by a pager with a 0 timestamp; the pager needs to be fixed.
===========

So yeah, my google fu is not good enough for these problems. Besides getting into the actual source of GDM to see what's going on, I suppose I could do an strace...?

-Chris