unable to access ICEauthority/no directory, logging in with HOME=/
 

Hi friends,

After updating my system and then installing kmyfirewall and fwbuilder with sudo, I restarted my box and when trying to login, I was getting this error:

xfce-session: Unable to access file /home/shantanu/.ICEauthority: Permission Denied

Whereas I'm able to login with root but not with user (shantanu).

Then I looked into forums and found http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.p...t=iceauthority . So, i tried copying the file ICEauthority, Xauthority, and change permission as described in the thread, but that too did not work. Then after looking a while in the forums, I got a clue to delete the account using userdel and then re-create the same account with adduser with the same directory (/home/shantanu). But now I'm getting:

no directory, logging in with HOME=/


Then I logged back in as root and created another account called "test" but again got the same error with this account also, ie, "no directory, logging in with HOME=/."

Finally, I tried to change permission of the folder /home/shantanu after logging in as root and doing:

chmod -R 755 /home/shantanu

But still getting the same error. Then I created another user test2 with home directory being /media/test2. Now, i was able to log in as normal.

NOTE: My / is hda9 and /home is hda8. I guess it is the problem with hda8 since the directories hda8 is not accessable by users but only by root.

Can anyone please suggest something. Also, i dont want to lose the settings of my account.
_________________
Thanks in advance.

Ravi S Ghosh

You can delete the .ICEauthority file and try logging in again.

As mentioned in my original post, i have tried that..

EDIT: After doing 6 hours of googling, I found this http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...m/100000554731 .

and following that I added "compat" in /etc/nsswitch.conf and got things working. However, I dont know what was wrong. Could anybody please shed some light on what went wrong. Also, in my /etc I find many files that seem to be backups like

passwd, passwd-, and passwd.pacnew
pmount.allow and pmount.allow.pacsave
esd.conf and esd.conf.pacsave
fstab and fstab.pacsave

So there are 4 kinds one is without any extension, another with " - ", one with pacnew, and finally one with pacsave.

Could anybody tell me which files are backup and can be deleted safely.

EDIT 2: The problem has nothing to do with nsswitch.conf. I removed compat. Actually, the problem was with permission in hda8 (/home) and /home/shantanu. I logged in as root and changed the the owner of /home to root with Code:

chown root /home



Then using right click on /home in thunar i changed permission of /home to read only for "users" and "others." Then, changed owner of /home/shantanu to shantanu
Code:

chown shantanu /home/shantanu



and changed permission of /home/shantanu using the same right click to "none" for "users" and "others."

And its working now.