[SOLVED] root entry appeared in gdm list

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ohw0571
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[SOLVED] root entry appeared in gdm list

Post by ohw0571 » 2012/02/21 08:28:15

Hello,

by default, the root account is hidden from the user list displayed by the graphical greeter (gdm) in EL 6.2. Yesterday I wanted to restart the X server, so I logged in to a text console (CTRL-ALT-F2) as root and initiated an init 3 > init 5 cycle. When X came up again, I found a root entry in gdm! But even after logging out of the root account and rebooting, this entry is still present. It seems that gdm somehow "remembers" that the root account has been used - nota bene: on a text console, not in graphical mode!

Any ideas how to get back to the default behaviour?
As a workaround I could hide the root entry explicitly by putting an "Exclude" statement in /etc/gdm/custom.conf but I would prefer to know (and eliminate) the real cause of the problem :-)

Thanks in advance
Oliver

pschaff
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[SOLVED] root entry appeared in gdm list

Post by pschaff » 2012/02/21 20:51:11

I don't know what caused the root entry to appear, but I have done the "telinit 3 ; telinit 5" sequence many times without that effect. Just tried it again to be sure.

Logging into the GUI as root from GDM using "Other ..." ([b]not[/b] recommended) does not make it appear on the list either.

ohw0571
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Re: root entry appeared in gdm list

Post by ohw0571 » 2012/02/22 09:42:51

Yes, I also tried to reprocude the effect on other machines - without success. At first I thought gdm might be evaluating /var/log/lastlog but this does not seem to be the case. Two things I should maybe add:
1. Admittedly this observaton was on RHEL 6.2 (but of course chances are the problem could occur on CentOS 6.2 as well)
2. If I remember correctly, my ALT-F7 command on the external keyboard of my Thinkpad put the machine into sleep mode at first instead of switching to the X display (so it was probably interpreted as Fn-F7) - and after waking up this root entry was visible at first with a "logged in" comment and a green checkmark. After logging out root from the text console, the "logged in" tag was gone, but the root entry persisted.

So the question is: which files does gdm read to determine which users to offer in the list?

Oliver

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Re: root entry appeared in gdm list

Post by pschaff » 2012/02/22 16:30:58

I don't know but see [code]rpm -ql gdm[/code]for the list of installed files.

ohw0571
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Re: root entry appeared in gdm list

Post by ohw0571 » 2012/03/07 11:07:20

Hello,

I have been able to find the reason for this behaviour. If interested, please refer to the upstream bug report
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=796698

As far as CentOS is concerned, this issue may be considered SOLVED.

Best regards,
Oliver

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Re: [SOLVED] root entry appeared in gdm list

Post by pschaff » 2012/03/07 12:27:41

Apparently the workaround is: "So for now the solution is to add root to the exclude list in custom.conf."

Thanks for reporting back. Marking this thread [SOLVED] for posterity.

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