Unreliable GDM auto-login

[Dutch_Master]

Debian Squeeze (no, don't get me started on the crap that is Gnome 3... ). GDM is configured to auto-login my user (only user) but it no longer does so reliably. Most of the time it's fine, but increasingly more often it fails and presents me with a login screen. I then do a forced-reboot on the hardware and mostly it auto-logs in afterwards. But recently it presented me again with another login screen. Another reboot solved that. I assume there's a script not read properly somewhere, but what, how and where? Could other scripts prevent it from proper execution (not that I've added anything) or the kernel not doing its job as instructed? There's plenty of RAM, 32 GB should suffice, right?

Over to you!

[ajgreeny]

With 32GB ram I assume your machine is also very fast and new.

So is boot happening too quickly so that GDM has not loaded fully and is not ready to autologin for you properly? I do not have any concrete evidence to support this; I'm just thinking out loud.

[Dutch_Master]

Well, it's not that new, but it is a 3.6 GHz AMD A8 proc, so you could be right. Introducing some wait-cycles may solve that, but where do I put those?

[ajgreeny]

Well, it's not that new, but it is a 3.6 GHz AMD A8 proc, so you could be right. Introducing some wait-cycles may solve that, but where do I put those?

Sorry, I haven't got a clue.

As I said, I was thinking out loud rather than giving you a real answer, but hoped it might give some clue about where to look for answers.

[Dutch_Master]

Thanks for that, it didn't for me, but perhaps someone else will?

[Ram]

Daft question DM, is the profile local to that machine or on your LAN?

[Dutch_Master]

Not daft, very clever actually. No, it's only local (that is, nothing linked from a NAS or something, nor LDAP or likewise). Only thing is an NFS share in fstab, but that is deliberately user-mounted, not at boot.

It's all from the local harddrive (an SSD) but the /home dir is on a 2 TB HDD. This is a full blown desktop machine but I do get boot times of 30 seconds from a cold start. Including the Grub timeout (standard 5 sec.) So I do think the "hardware too fast for the software" idea isn't too far fetched...

[Ram]

My main PC stores it's profile ( I was using a roaming profile when I was running a few PC before.) on a NFS share from my server and the way Ubuntu network manager even with a manual login I sometimes get my desktop loaded without any icons on the Desktop, only started with 12.04 and switching to LXDE. You get a late notification of eth* disconnected / connected.

Just thought it might have been similar if your using not local profile.