[pulseaudio-discuss] Multi Workstation Single Home Directory NFS Mount

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2016-09-08 at 17:51 -0400, rjs wrote:
> Hi,
> First off, I am running on RedHat 6, not under my control, so I have pulse
> 0.9.22.
> I am running in normal user mode and everything is generally fine.
> The issue is that we have multiple workstations and my user account is
> NFS mounted across all workstations in the same directory.
> If I have pulse running on one, then I get on another workstation and get
> pulse running, the first, and eventually the second go out to lunch.
> No applications can connect, pacmd returns:
> "No PulseAudio daemon running, etc."

Note that pacmd is not like other applications. Normal applications
should autospawn pulseaudio if it's not running, pacmd won't do that.

> In addition, I believe the pulseaudio process stops and restarts every 5
> seconds, generating many /tmp/pulse-.... directories.

First of all, home-directory-on-NFS *should* be supported just fine.
The whole purpose of using the /tmp/pulse directories is to make this
use case work.

Restarting every 5 seconds is a problem in itself, but even then, that
should not generate multiple /tmp/pulse directories. In the ~/.pulse
directory there should be one asdfasdfasdf:runtime symlink per machine.
The "asdfasdfasdf" part is the machine-id, so every machine has its own
symlink to its own /tmp/pulse directory. A new /tmp/pulse directory
needs to be created only if the asdfasdfasdf:runtime symlink doesn't
exist or points to non-existing target (I think wrong permissions can
trigger /tmp/pulse regeneration too).

What are the permissions of the asdfadsfasdf:runtime symlink, and what
are the permissions of the /tmp/pulse directories? Anything strange in
those?

What does "PULSE_LOG=99 pactl info" print when things don't work?

> By the way, the PID of the pulse instance, on each machine, is contained in
> one of those directories, as I expect.
> The only way to be able to connect again is to logout on one of the
> workstations,
> kill pulseaudio, delete all of the /tmp/pulse-... directories, then restart.
> Due to our environment, there is no way to avoid this configuration and most
> likely cannot update our pulse version.
> Is running pulseaudio in system-wide mode an option to solve this?

Yes, running in the system-wide mode will likely work around the issue.

-- 
Tanu