[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulse audio and NFS home directories.

[mike _]

(Apologies if more than one version of the message appears on the
list, Google Mail said encountered an error the first couple of times
I tried to send and indicated the message wasn't sent.)


I have a machine running SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 which includes
PulseAudio 0.9.12.

If I log on as a user who's home directory is on the local disk then
the total size of the users' ~/.pulse directory is a few tens of
kilobytes

If I log on as a user who's home directory is mounted via NFS from a
Solaris machine using ufs then some of the files in the user's home
directory are several megabytes in size. E.g.:

-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxxx xx   55 2009-05-08 10:26
7c163669fa3688bf66ba6ccd49ef3bce:default-sink
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxxx xx   53 2009-05-08 10:26
7c163669fa3688bf66ba6ccd49ef3bce:default-source
-rw------- 1 xxxxx xx 3.1M 2009-05-08 08:52
7c163669fa3688bf66ba6ccd49ef3bce:device-volumes.i686-suse-linux-gnu.gdbm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 xxxxx xx   23 2009-05-08 08:52
7c163669fa3688bf66ba6ccd49ef3bce:runtime -> /tmp/pulse-Gf9iJqnCe6hY
-rw------- 1 xxxxx xx 3.0M 2009-05-08 08:52
7c163669fa3688bf66ba6ccd49ef3bce:stream-volumes.i686-suse-linux-gnu.gdbm

Sometimes those files that are several megabytes in size persist
between sessions.

If I give a user that normally uses an NFS mounted home directory a
local home directory, the file sizes are a few tens of kilobytes
rather than megabytes.

If I log in with a user using an NFS mount home directory where I have
made their ~/.pulse directory a symlink to a directory on the local
harddisk then the file sizes are a few megabytes. However using a
symlink only worked the once. Subsequent logins with ~/.pulse being a
symlink result in pulseaudio failing to start up properly, the error
"failed to create secure directory: permission denied" appears in
/var/log/messages.

So there is a huge disparity in the size of some files in ~/.pulse
depending on whether the ~/.pulse directory, or even a symlink in
place of the ~/.pulse directory, is on the local disk or on an NFS
mounted home directory.

The disparity in file sizes is both curious and potentially
problematic due to the size of some of the user's quotas. Some users
have very small quotas so the less taken up by configuration files the
better. (I have no control over the size of these users' quotas.)
Whilst I briefly thought that I could modify
/usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 so that it makes ~/.pulse a symbolic
link to a directory on the local disk before launching pulseaudio,
this does not seem to be an option due to the  "failed to create
secure directory: permission denied" problem.


Is anyone able to offer an explanation and/or solution for why the
file sizes are so large on NFS, and/or why pulseaudio chocks when
~/.pulse is a symbolic link?


thanks,

mike