Missing .ICEauthority in Xubuntu - can't log in

[piergen]

Can't log into my XFCE desktop like I normaly do.
all the sudden I get notified that my xsession lasted less then 10 seconds.

Looking at the error I can see this:

Unable to access file /home/username/.iceauthority: No such file or directory

Using failsafe I can start a terminal. From terminal I tried to start X

sudo startx

Result: Running on desplay:0

So I tried to run this;

sudo startxfce4

And I get up a graphical desktop.


So this is not a critical situation as I easily can use this method to log on, but as there has been something causing this I would like to be able to resolve this nonetheless.


Btw it is not the old chmod trick in play here, cause my .iceauthority file is gone alltogheter.

[piergen]

From Thunar it appears the .ICEauthority is gone, even when I view hidden files. But to be sure I run a ls -la inside home folder then I can actually see the file that is missing. Also becuase of the way I logged in via gnome failsafe and sudo start xfce4 I can see a second -ICEauthority -n

-?????????  ? ?     ?           ?                ? .ICEauthority
-rw-------  1 root  root      163 2011-04-24 10:53 .ICEauthority-n

As you see the original file is stripped of all ownership so I can't access or even delete the file.

I have tried chmod and chown without any luck. Any idea what I can do to get this file deleted or restored?

[hazel]

It looks like the kernel can't read the inode of the .ICEAuthority file, which is where all the information about it is stored. This is probably a corrupt partition and the cure is to run fsck on the partition.

Is this file on the root partition or on a separate home partition? If the latter, fixing it is easy. Just unmount the partition (as root) and fsck it, then reboot. If it's the root partition, you need to boot from a live cdrom (you can probably use your installation cdrom for this) and run fsck from there because it isn't safe to fix a partition that is mounted.

man fsck will give you more information.

[piergen]

Is this file on the root partition or on a separate home partition? If the latter, fixing it is easy. Just unmount the partition (as root) and fsck it, then reboot. If it's the root partition, you need to boot from a live cdrom (you can probably use your installation cdrom for this) and run fsck from there because it isn't safe to fix a partition that is mounted.

I am not sure I understand your question here. I run a 4 drive software raid 0 setup.

The partitions are like this:

Device:		Directory:
/dev/sda4		/
/dev/sda1		/boot
/dev/md0		        /home
/dev/sdb1		/tmp
/dev/sda3		/usr
/dev/sda2		/var

So I should run fsck from terminal or do I need to run fsck from a livecd?

Edit:
Just remember system did an automatic fsck the other day and I found the logs in var:

/dev/md0: clean, 102268/91578368 files, 212358557/366285952 blocks

Seems ok, now I am even more lost.

[piergen]

Hmm used recovery mode to umount /dev/md0
Then I was able to run fsck. It was all good.
So mounted /dev/md0 back on and tried rm.

So Then I tried to do the rm /home/myusername/.ICEauthority

But I got the same result even from recovery:

rm: cannot remove /home/myusername/.ICEauthority: no such file or directory

And I know the stupid file is there, cause if I do a ls -la from the same directory I can actually see the stupid file, and I can see that root is not owner, and that the stupid file don't have any owner.

Still one should be able to delete the stupid thing?

From within Thunar I can not see the file even if I turn on "Show Hidden Files". But when I fired up Gnome Commander I was able to view the file. So then I tried to xut out the file and transfer it to another directory but that didnt work either. Nor did it work to delete it from Gnome Commander.

[hazel]

Right! We're getting there. You've established that it's the home partition that's at fault and you can unmount and check it in recovery mode. But fsck doesn't always do a full check if the partition looks clean. So the next thing to try is to force it to do a full check.

If it's an ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem, you can do this with fsck.ext3 -fk. The -f option forces a check and the -k option checks for bad disk blocks as well. You could also add a v for verbose output. And check the exit code of fsck afterwards with echo $?. These are some values you could get:
0 - No errors
1 - File system errors corrected
2 - File system errors corrected, system should
be rebooted
4 - File system errors left uncorrected
8 - Operational error
16 - Usage or syntax error.

If that doesn't work, you're going to need help from someone more experienced than me!

[piergen]

Right! We're getting there. You've established that it's the home partition that's at fault and you can unmount and check it in recovery mode. But fsck doesn't always do a full check if the partition looks clean. So the next thing to try is to force it to do a full check.

If it's an ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem, you can do this with fsck.ext3 -fk. The -f option forces a check and the -k option checks for bad disk blocks as well. You could also add a v for verbose output. And check the exit code of fsck afterwards with echo $?. These are some values you could get:
0 - No errors
1 - File system errors corrected
2 - File system errors corrected, system should
be rebooted
4 - File system errors left uncorrected
8 - Operational error
16 - Usage or syntax error.

If that doesn't work, you're going to need help from someone more experienced than me!

I did fsck fkv in recovery after umounting /dev/md0
It corrected some errors, but the thing is I didnt know how to save that to a file so I figured I could look in the /var/logs after to see what was corrected. Well apparently things did not show up in them logs. So I guess the v=verbose parameter did not do what I expected it to, write into log files.

One good thing is that the stupid .ICEauthority was deleted by fsck. It was also some other errors corrected but I can't remember what.

Now I can log in like normal, but the xfce panels and menus are misssing. So That I most sort out now and then I think it is all golden. Thx a lot for the help all.