Hello everyone,

I am working on a debian server for which I have setup the Gnome Display Manager for local and remote access. After a huge mistake where I did chown -R for a user in directory / (don't ask why...) I couldn't access the server remotely. I fixed that by doing chown -R root / and now this is fixed. Nevertheless since I did that mistake I cannot access the server through the Display Manager and I get the following errors:

Could not update ICEauthority file /var/lib/gdm3/.ICE authority

and

There is a problem with the configuration server. (/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status-256)

According to the many posts in this and other forums I have to delete the /var/lib/gdm3/.ICEauthority file along with some others. Although when I go in the directory those files are nowhere to be found:

root@zeus:/var/lib/gdm3# ls -la
total 16
drwxr-x--- 3 root root 4096 Nov 14 17:48 .
drw-rw-r-- 62 root root 4096 Nov 14 17:47 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 19 13:51 .gconf.mandatory
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 138 Nov 19 13:51 .gconf.path

As suggested I changed the owner of the directory to root but still nothing.

Can anyone help me please?

Thank you,

You made everything on the machine owned by root. Users home, some logs, and other config files are not suppose to be owned by root.
I assume that you are doing that as user?
Because the file is owned by root, or does not exist.

Usually root logons with ssh and xserver are disabled by default.
Are you trying to access the server as user or root?
Is there a ~/.ICEauthority? Change ownership back to user.

I did so yes. Then I changed the ownership of the each user's home directory (/home/someuser) to the corresponding user. Don't know if I forgot someone though since there are many users on this server.


When users try to log in remotely they get these messages. But also I have installed the GNOME display manager (gdm3) on the server itself so when it reboots I can see these messages on the local machine before it goes to the front page prompting for user login.

The file does not exist in the directory /var/lib/gdm3/. Although there is one in each /home/someuser/ directory. In the specific server we have allowed root access via ssh but I login as user and sudo -i to become root. The .ICEauthority file in the /home/someuser directory of each user has the ownership of the specified user with permissions -rw-------.


What am I missing?

You look like you have covered it.
Just a few thoughts.
Look at the permissions on /tmp /var and ~
Then search for answers to the error you get.
Good luck.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1333683
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...nf/+bug/577545
http://thingsyoudontlearnatschool.bl...blem-with.html
http://www.linuxtrance.com/index.php...on-server.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-error-799626/

Thank you for your help. I will check them out. I just can't figure out why the .ICEauthority cannot be created after the restart. If I figure this out I'll be done. I'm missing something that has to do with permissions.

None of the solutions work... Anyone else with any ideas? My var/lib/gdm3 directory is totally empty btw...
the .ICEauthority files for each user and root have permissions:
-rw-r--r--