Oh Nooooo!

[CB_Vancity]

So yeah, I went to reopen an old comp that I thought was fixed by my recent update from 2013.2.0 to 2013.2.53 and it suddenly didn't work. It was working without fail only a week ago when I opened it to show it off to a client.

Anyways, for some stupid reason, I assumed it was somehow because of a configuration change, which was dumb, but regardless of why, I did the impossibly stupid thing of uninstalling ALL of the Autodesk software versions while logged in as root. Then I rebooted and reinstalled just the 2013.2.53 versions of Smoke & Lustre.

And now things don't run very well at all.

The two very obvious issues are with the terminal and Firefox.
The terminal takes FOREVER to actually display something, and this includes the terminal that opens to run the Smoke app. I just timed it and it took 1min + 20sec!
And it takes this long to do anything in the terminal too.
Firefox however, does display an error, but because I am not a Linux guru I cannot make much sense of it.

It says...

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for Gecko. Some configuration settings may not work properly.

Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-smoke2013_2_53/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied 2: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-smoke2013_2_53/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-smoke2013_2_53/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied 2: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-smoke2013_2_53/lock/ior' not opened

I am considering re-installing the DKU, but I really don't know what else to try.

The Smoke software seems to work fine... of course my comp still doesn't open, but I don't really care about that too much at the moment.

Any suggestions from the Area community?
Thank you guys,
_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris.

Do you get that Terminal lag in all Linux users, or only in a specific user, e.g. the Flame user?

As for the Firefox issue, I recommend reinstalling the DKU as that will reinstall FF and may also help with whatever is causing the lag in the shell.

Regards,

robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Will do.

Should I uninstall the Smoke & Lustre again?

Or run all three installs overtop of what is already there?

The Lustre user appears to be unaffected.  Both Terminal and Firefox are running fine from within that user.

Thanks Robert!

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

In this case it sounds like the issue is specific to the "Smoke" user that the Smoke installer has created.

So no need to reinstall the DKU. Just reinstall Smoke.

Or, even easier, just use Smoke from the Lustre user account.

Regards,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Hi Robert,

Since I have a little downtime, I would rather fix the issue than put a post-it on the monitor to warn others not to operate the machine with that user.

So far today I have tried;

I did the DKU reinstall just in case... no effect.

I reinstalled smoke again... no effect.

I reinstalled smoke using the --force option... no effect.

I reinstalled smoke using both --force and --uid=*a number I got from /etc/passwd*... no effect.

I seems like a permissions thing with the smoke user, right?

Would following the instructions on this website work?

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/reset-rhel-centos-fedora-package-file-permission.html

Cheers & Thanks Robert!

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris.

Let's try this:

1. Log out of the current user and log into the root account.

2. run this command (replace <user name> with the actual username of the Smoke user account):

userdel <user name>

 3. Remove the user's home folder:

rm -rf /home/<user name>

 4. Reinstall Smoke.

Cheers,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Hmmmm... now I am concerned that there could be a problem with the installer.

Just to confirm, I entered;

userdel smoke2013_2_53
rm -rf /home/smoke2013_2_53

And this made the smoke user go away.

Then I ran;

./SMOKE_INSTALL

Which it zipped through very quickly.  Then I logged out of the root user and found that there was still no Smoke user to log in as.

Same thing after a reboot.

I verified the checksum and the .tar.gz file size and it all appears correct.

For fun, I ran it again using --force, but there's still no user.

./INSTALL_SMOKE --force

At least I still have the Lustre login!

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris.

Do you uninstall Smoke before reinstalling it? If not, then the install might skip a few things, since it sees that the software is already installed.

The Linux user is created by the main Smoke RPM package, and that package won't get installed if it's already there.

So let's force install that package:

1. Open a shell as root and go to the folder where you have the smoke installer.

2. Go into the "dist" subfolder and locate the autodesk.smoke.app_<version>.rpm in there.

3. Copy the file name and then force install it with this command:

rpm -Uvh --force <rpm name>

Once that's installed, the Smoke user should be available once again.

regards,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

No I haven't unistalled it again.  It didn't help the last few times.

Running the rpm command has definitely reinstalled it, and created a new Smoke user, but unfortuately I still have the same problems when I log in there.

I deleted the user a second time and reinstalled it again just for good measure and still no dice.

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris.

Apologies for the delayed response. This sounds pretty strange. Normally, deleting the users's home folder should have gotten rid of those issues.

What happens if you create a brand new Linux user? Does it inherit the problems?

To create a new user open a terminal as root and type:

useradd <username>

 Then set the user's password with:

passwd <username>

Regards,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Hi Robert, no worries about the delay.  Actually, thankyou for continuing to follow up with me on this.

I created a new user called "iamchris" and added a password.  The user didn't show up at the login screen with the other ones, but when I typed in the credentials it logged me in no problem.  When I opened terminal and firefox, both worked as they should, no issues there.

Just for the heck of it, I tried userdel again for the smoke2013_2_53 user and then tried "useradd smoke2013_2_53".  This made it impossible to login, so I went back to the command line and added a password.  Then I went back to the login screen and used that password to log in.  How does the installer create users without passwords?

Anyways, more importantly, this new smoke user I created from the useradd command had a bare blue desktop (no autodesk one anymore) and the terminal and firefox were both still misbehaving... ugh.  Back to square one.

Cheers,

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

I just now realized what the issue could be.

The users created by the application do not store their home profile under /home, but under /usr/discreet/<application>

In that folder is a hidden .mozilla folder which holds Firefox user preferences as well as the .cshrc file that holds shell preferences.

I imagine there's some corruption going on there. When I asked you to reinstall Smoke, that did not remove those files/folders, so nothing really changed.

What you could try is to manually rename those files/ folders and see if that fixes things.

1. Open a Terminal under root and go to that folder:

cd /usr/discreet/smoke_2013.2.53/

2. Rename the .mozilla folder:

mv .mozilla .mozilla_old

3. Save and unzip the attached cshrc file (a clean one I've taken out of a fresh install) to your desktop and write it over your .cshrc file.

mv ~/Desktop/cshrc  /usr/discreet/smoke_2013.2.53/.cshrc

4. Exit KDE and log back into KDE with the Smoke user. See if things have improved. Firefox will create a new profile when you first run it.

Another way to restore things would be to delete those items and reinstall Smoke.

Regards,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Dang!  It felt like that was going to fix it!  No joy though.

I did it several times over, I even restarted the system before trying it and still no dice.

[CB_Vancity]

Can I try this and then reinstall?

rm -r /usr/discreet/smoke2013_2_53

 I've had a look through it and I don't believe that there is anything valuable in there...  well, except init.cfg, but i can copy that easily enough.

[CB_Vancity]

Ooooor, if that isn't a good idea / doesn't work, could I reinstall the app with a custom user name & account & /usr/discreet/ directory?

Like "smoke2013_2_3"?

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris,

Yes, if you have the time, you can uninstall Smoke, then remove the /usr/discreet/smoke2013.2.53 folder and then reinstall.

As long as you don't touch the other folders under /usr/discreet (especially /usr/discreet/clip, /usr/discreet/project, /usr/discreet/sw) your projects should be safe.

I'm surprised though that deleting .mozilla did not at least reset Firefox...

Regards,

robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Well, whatever the problem is, it isn't in the /usr/discreet/smoke*/ directory.

Steps I used.

1. rmsoft & removed smoke*.app

2. deleted /usr/discreet/smoke*/ directory (using the gui, shouldn't make a difference right?)

3. ./INSTALL_SMOKE --force

4. reboot machine

Same result.

Is there a way to create a custom user for the install?

Cheers & Thanks again Robert!

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris.

AFAIK, there's no easy way of having the installer create the Linux user under a different name. And I don't think it would make a difference, since I'm beginning to suspect that the installer might be corrupt.

Have you verified the installer's checksum to make sure it downloaded in one piece? There's a checksum file in the release announcement.

Let's take a look at the installation log and see if there are any clues as to why it doesn't create the user account properly.

Please send me the Smoke 2013.2.53 logs from under /var/log/autodesk/

One thing you can do if nothing else works is to create a brand new user (say "Smoke") and use that. You won't have the fancy Autodesk wallpaper and Smoke desktop icons by default, but you can add those manually afterwards.

If you decided to go that route, I'll show you how to set the user to log in with a blank password and how to have the user name appear in the KDE login list.

Regards,

Robert.

[A_Over_B]

in a shell

md5sum autodesk_*********.tar

more autodesk_********.tar.md5

[CB_Vancity]

I will try re-downloading the Smoke*tar.gz in the morning, but the md5sum result matches.

[root@]# md5sum Smoke_2013.2.53_Linux_RHEL5.tar.gz
eeb9f1b7d79da83095634a90209f66b7  Smoke_2013.2.53_Linux_RHEL5.tar.gz
[root@]# more Smoke_2013.2.53_Linux_RHEL5.tar.gz.cksum
Tue May 21 14:46:46 2013
        File name: Smoke_2013.2.53_Linux_RHEL5.tar.gz
        File Size: 1251427663
        md5sum:    eeb9f1b7d79da83095634a90209f66b7
[root@]#

 Robert, I'm attaching the log file.  Nothing in there jumped out at me, but I wouldn't necessarily know what I'm looking for.