I definitely have write access to my home directory--but I lose read and write access when I become a superuser. Yes, that seems strange to me too, but our former sysadmin told me this is how things are supposed to be for remotely mounted filesystems. Maybe he misunderstood. I do not have superuser access on the ldap/fileserver. I am running kde as my own self. If, in startkde, I add a line printing the user running the script, it's myself. startkde also has a line in it which evals the following command: $ dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS='unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-mPVsi5pTYf,guid=b0d4c9865e166308b1fd67dd48348990'; export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS; DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=25584; DBUS_SESSION_BUS_WINDOWID=16777217; Then, the following startkde line calls qdbus: $ qdbus :1.0 org.freedesktop.DBus As you can see, both commands work fine when I run them myself, but from within startkde--despite the fact that printing `whoami` gives my own username--the command gives no output. As a result, qdbus doesn't work, and kde fails to start. I'm guessing this is a funky permissions issue due to the ldap auth. John <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 12:18 PM, Shawn Rutledge <<a href="mailto:shawn.t.rutledge@gmail.com">shawn.t.rutledge@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d">On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Arkady <<a href="mailto:bamboowarrior@gmail.com">bamboowarrior@gmail.com</a>> wrote: > I'm a bit of a n00b, but I RTFM'd to the best of my ability. As testament to > my n00bness, I only just learned that if you've got a remotely mounted > directory, you can't access it when you're superuser (even with sudo, even > read-only). I think this may be contributing to my dbus woes. </div>That's weird.  Sounds like you need to troubleshoot that.  The no_root_squash option (which would be in /etc/exports on the NFS server) would ensure that if you are root on the client you are root on the server too, but can be a security hole depending on the context (if all the users are trusted, you probably don't care).  But there is more to it than that; I wouldn't expect to lose privileges by becoming root, that you had as a regular user.  But you are running KDE as a regular user right?  Doesn't that user have write permission to his own NFS-mounted home directory? </blockquote></div>