[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio symlink causing problem with CIFS-mounted home directory

[Mark Ellerby]

Hi,

I wonder if anyone can help with this. I am running a Fedora 11 desktop 
with home directories mounted from CIFS file systems off a Samba share. 
I noticed Gnome complaining that it is unable to start the 
gnome-settings-daemon when I try to open the appearance preferences. It 
sometimes hangs the system and I have to reboot or reset it.
I looked in /var/log/messages and I noticed a few messages like this, 
which seemed concomitant to me opening up the Gnome prefs:

Nov 10 15:14:02 mgd-lin-11-23 pulseaudio[2414]: core-util.c: Failed to 
symlink /home/cifsuser/.pulse/753d3047c74d8cf35719694b4af98160:runtime 
to /tmp/pulse-Js7neClsndF1: Permission denied
Nov 10 15:08:11 mgd-lin-11-23 pulseaudio[2008]: lock-autospawn.c: Cannot 
access autospawn lock.

So I looked to see why Pulseaudio was not creating these symlinks, and 
after some experimentation found that I was not able to create any 
simlinks of my own from my home directory to something in /tmp. It must 
be something to do with CIFS, because it works OK when symlinking from 
an NFS-mounted directory.

We are pretty committed to using CIFS for home dirs. I seem to be in a 
bit of a tight spot here. I can remove pulseaudio altogether, and things 
work fine, but I think our users will want sound so it's not really an 
option to do it that way.

Is there any way of running pulse audio without it trying to create 
symlinks into /tmp ?

Thanks,
Mark