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From: Damon Getsman on 8 Apr 2008 11:00
I am currently administering a Sun Ray cluster utilizing SRSS for a
WAN with approximately 40 users. I hope you will forgive me for my
neophyte level of knowledge on this setup. Their desktops are all
GNOME 2.22, and the cluster is set up to allow their access with
individual smart cards.

I have had a problem described to me for a project by the
administrator who is still training me on the admin of this system, as
my previous knowledgebase is basically all networked linux PC
administration. The problem is, as I have been told, an issue with
the enlightened sound daemon when the users login multiple times at
once (I'm not even sure how this is possible with smart card logins;
I'm just running with what I've been told at this point). There are
three servers which the user logs into from the various terminals.
Evidently they are set up to round-robin the resources. Anyway, when
a user is logged into all three machines and attempts another login,
obviously it goes back to the first server in the list. When this
happens, the /tmp/.esd socket and/or lockfiles prevent sound
capability from the most recently authenticated terminal.

I was wondering if this is a common setup and if there are any
resources that I can use to try to find information on this setup to
fix the issue. I could write a python script to be invoked at some
point while gdm is starting up, but I'd like to find a fix that isn't
as kludgy, if at all possible.

Being as I'm going to be administering this system for some time in
the future, I'm also interested in any resources you could point me at
that would be relevant to this sort of setup. I haven't had much luck
finding documentation on the sun website relevant as of yet.

Thank you for your time and help. :)
From: John Doe on 8 Apr 2008 14:56
Damon Getsman wrote:
> I am currently administering a Sun Ray cluster utilizing SRSS for a
> WAN with approximately 40 users. I hope you will forgive me for my
> neophyte level of knowledge on this setup. Their desktops are all
> GNOME 2.22, and the cluster is set up to allow their access with
> individual smart cards.
>
> I have had a problem described to me for a project by the
> administrator who is still training me on the admin of this system, as
> my previous knowledgebase is basically all networked linux PC
> administration. The problem is, as I have been told, an issue with
> the enlightened sound daemon when the users login multiple times at
> once (I'm not even sure how this is possible with smart card logins;
> I'm just running with what I've been told at this point). There are
> three servers which the user logs into from the various terminals.
> Evidently they are set up to round-robin the resources. Anyway, when
> a user is logged into all three machines and attempts another login,
> obviously it goes back to the first server in the list. When this
> happens, the /tmp/.esd socket and/or lockfiles prevent sound
> capability from the most recently authenticated terminal.
>
> I was wondering if this is a common setup and if there are any
> resources that I can use to try to find information on this setup to
> fix the issue. I could write a python script to be invoked at some
> point while gdm is starting up, but I'd like to find a fix that isn't
> as kludgy, if at all possible.
>
> Being as I'm going to be administering this system for some time in
> the future, I'm also interested in any resources you could point me at
> that would be relevant to this sort of setup. I haven't had much luck
> finding documentation on the sun website relevant as of yet.
>
> Thank you for your time and help. :)

Probably better posting on this group:

http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users

The SunRay help is really good.
From: John Doe on 8 Apr 2008 14:59
Damon Getsman wrote:
> I am currently administering a Sun Ray cluster utilizing SRSS for a
> WAN with approximately 40 users. I hope you will forgive me for my
> neophyte level of knowledge on this setup. Their desktops are all
> GNOME 2.22, and the cluster is set up to allow their access with
> individual smart cards.
>
> I have had a problem described to me for a project by the
> administrator who is still training me on the admin of this system, as
> my previous knowledgebase is basically all networked linux PC
> administration. The problem is, as I have been told, an issue with
> the enlightened sound daemon when the users login multiple times at
> once (I'm not even sure how this is possible with smart card logins;
> I'm just running with what I've been told at this point). There are
> three servers which the user logs into from the various terminals.
> Evidently they are set up to round-robin the resources. Anyway, when
> a user is logged into all three machines and attempts another login,
> obviously it goes back to the first server in the list. When this
> happens, the /tmp/.esd socket and/or lockfiles prevent sound
> capability from the most recently authenticated terminal.
>
> I was wondering if this is a common setup and if there are any
> resources that I can use to try to find information on this setup to
> fix the issue. I could write a python script to be invoked at some
> point while gdm is starting up, but I'd like to find a fix that isn't
> as kludgy, if at all possible.
>
> Being as I'm going to be administering this system for some time in
> the future, I'm also interested in any resources you could point me at
> that would be relevant to this sort of setup. I haven't had much luck
> finding documentation on the sun website relevant as of yet.
>
> Thank you for your time and help. :)

Probably better posting on this group:

http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users

The SunRay help is really good.
From: Damon Getsman on 11 Apr 2008 13:14
> Damon Getsman wrote:

> > I have had a problem described to me for a project by the
> > administrator who is still training me on the admin of this system, as
> > my previous knowledgebase is basically all networked linux PC
> > administration. The problem is, as I have been told, an issue with
> > the enlightened sound daemon when the users login multiple times at
> > once (I'm not even sure how this is possible with smart card logins;
> > I'm just running with what I've been told at this point). There are
> > three servers which the user logs into from the various terminals.
> > Evidently they are set up to round-robin the resources. Anyway, when
> > a user is logged into all three machines and attempts another login,
> > obviously it goes back to the first server in the list. When this
> > happens, the /tmp/.esd socket and/or lockfiles prevent sound
> > capability from the most recently authenticated terminal.

Okay yesterday I actually went out to the site where this issue is
occurring on our WAN. Evidently the problem was not described to me
correctly. The issue is not that the same issue logs in on multiple
machines at once. The issue is caused because of a person logging in
on more than just one terminal at different times. For instance, one
of our receptionists uses a primary terminal at the front desk with a
SIM card to log in. Normally she only uses this one machine and the
sound works just fine. However, if she removes her SIM card and logs
in on a different terminal, the sound will stop working for any
instance of her logged in on the servers (ie the new terminal she's
using will not have sound, and when she goes to any other terminal or
her primary terminal and logs in again, there will be no sound). This
issue also occurs when she is not logged in at her terminal, and
someone else comes along and logs in on it for a bit. After that
point, there will be no sound at her terminal. To this point I am
still trying to get more detailed information on the issue, because
there are several points that I'm vague on. Descriptions that I've
gotten from someone more knowledgeable about this than myself have, to
date, been vague enough to leave me rather boggled on what exactly is
causing this. To this point our only fix has been to log in to the
server as the superuser, go into /tmp/.esd, and manually wipe all of
the materials that the user owns.

I know that this is a vague description, and I apologize; I'm
gathering more information on this as quickly as I can. Based on
this, however, has anyone heard of an issue like this before?

And yes, I will also be posting this to the filibeto sunray-users
mailing list, I just want to gather as much information as possible as
web searches have turned up zilch for me to this point.

Thanks in advance.

-Damon Getsman
From: Damon Getsman on 15 Apr 2008 09:59
On Apr 11, 12:14 pm, Damon Getsman <dgets...(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Okay yesterday I actually went out to the site where this issue is
> occurring on our WAN. Evidently the problem was not described to me
> correctly. The issue is not that the same issue logs in on multiple
> machines at once. The issue is caused because of a person logging in
> on more than just one terminal at different times. For instance, one
> of our receptionists uses a primary terminal at the front desk with a
> SIM card to log in. Normally she only uses this one machine and the
> sound works just fine. However, if she removes her SIM card and logs
> in on a different terminal, the sound will stop working for any
> instance of her logged in on the servers (ie the new terminal she's
> using will not have sound, and when she goes to any other terminal or
> her primary terminal and logs in again, there will be no sound). This
> issue also occurs when she is not logged in at her terminal, and
> someone else comes along and logs in on it for a bit. After that
> point, there will be no sound at her terminal. To this point I am
> still trying to get more detailed information on the issue, because
> there are several points that I'm vague on. Descriptions that I've
> gotten from someone more knowledgeable about this than myself have, to
> date, been vague enough to leave me rather boggled on what exactly is
> causing this. To this point our only fix has been to log in to the
> server as the superuser, go into /tmp/.esd, and manually wipe all of
> the materials that the user owns.

I'm not sure anybody else is using a setup that is comparable to the
one that I'm working on here, but there was a relatively simple
solution to this issue. I just went into the /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
directory on the server machines (probably something else for anyone
else-- I'm using OpenSuSE servers) and created 0005.Misc.Cleanup with
the following sh script:

rm -Rf `/usr/bin/find /tmp/.esd -user $USER`

Thanks for the pointers!

-Damon Getsman
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