No internet connection - UUID or ICEauthority problem?

[gwyn]

Hi,

I have lost my internet connection. When I try to edit my wired connection through Network Settings, I get this message: Did not find a connection with UUIID '(nul)'

Some background:

I just installed Mageia 3 using live DVD gnome version (I have a dual boot alongside Fedora 17). Everything went fine, except that I couldn't initially login to M3. I got an error on login saying "Could not update ICEauthority file /home/gwyn/.ICEauthority". I solved this by running this in a terminal: "chown gwyn -R /home/gwyn"

Once logged in, everything was good but wireless didn't work. I installed broadcom-wl wireless driver. I installed KDE and other software. No problems. Then I logged out of Mageia and booted into Fedora. No problems. But when I went back to Mageia, I had lost my internet connection.

Other things I did: configured Thunderbird in Mageia to store mail on a separate data partition that both Mageia and Fedora can access. When I logged into Fedora, I had lost full access to this partition. I had this problem before. The story is here: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=266929 I tried solving it, but mucked something up and now can't log into Fedora at all. I get the same ICEauthority message as I had in Mageia: "Could not update ICEauthority file"

Can anyone help me?
Gwyn

[doktor5000]

So you're using the same /home partition for both Fedora and Mageia?

[srtxg]

while sharing a /home across multiple distributions may work (as long as programs used are version-compatible for the config files they may write); there is a point you may be aware: user identification is not stored as user names, but as numbers.
And that number must be the same on the different distributions, otherwise you will have wrong permissions at each boot.

Given your "wrong permission" message it seems that is your problem.

look at /etc/passwd in each distro, and ensure that the same uid number (3d field) and gid number (4th field) are used. If not, change them; then "run chown -R uid.gid /home/username" to fix them.
In drakuser you can, when creating a new user, tell a numeric uid to use instead of letting the system choose one.

(if that was the case, and this message solves your problem, please change the subject of first message to:
"[SOLVED] wrong uid for user with shared /home "

[gwyn]

Thanks for your replies.

I have different home partitions for each distro. In Fedora, I did change the final line in /etc/passwd to match the line in Mageia. So that the uid and gid were both 500:

gwyn:x:500:500:Gwyn Williams:/home/gwyn:/bin/bash

But now I can't log in to Fedora at all. It seems to boot but hangs with the Fedora logo and never asks for my login details. Should I start in single user mode and try to run "run chown -R uid.gid /home/username"?

And I can't access the internet in Mageia. I have to boot up the live DVD to get on the internet. If I can get internet access in Mageia, I'd at least have a working computer. Why would my internet not be working?

Gwyn

[doktor5000]

I have different home partitions for each distro. In Fedora, I did change the final line in /etc/passwd to match the line in Mageia. So that the uid and gid were both 500:

gwyn:x:500:500:Gwyn Williams:/home/gwyn:/bin/bash

Well, but you didn't change the ownership of all your directories/files on the fedora /home. You have effectively
disabled access of your user to those files. Yes, you should definitely boot in single user mode and chown -R on your /home/username.

The Mageia issue seems something different, but please keep those issues separate. It's quite confusing
to track two problems in on thread, switching back-and-forth between those two.

[gwyn]

I booted into single user mode in Fedora and ran "run chown -R uid.gid /home/gwyn". I just got at error message: Failed to search for file: Could not connect: Connection refused.

Maybe we can forget about the login problem.

But why can't I connect to the internet in Mageia? Can anyone help me diagnose the problem? If I try to edit the network connection, I still get "Did not find a connection with UUIID '(nul)'" I thought I would try uninstalling the broadcom-wl wireless driver I installed, but I can't get Install & Remove Software to open. I get a fatal error: "Couldn't open RPM DB () at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.16.3/Rpmdrake/open_db. pm line 74"

[doktor5000]

Your installation seems severely damaged, you should reinstall.

[gwyn]

I reinstalled Mageia. I can connect to the internet but have wireless problems. I will start another thread.
Thanks
gwyn

[tom_]

Should I start in single user mode and try to run "run chown -R uid.gid /home/username"?

no, you should run

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chown -R uid.gid /home/username

[doktor5000]

Actually there should be a colon between user and group:

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chown -R uid:gid /home/username

Also i'm assuming that you know to replace uid:gid with the correct user id and group id, not running this command literally as you posted it.

[gwyn]

Ah, no, I didn't realise that! So I have to run "chown -R 500:500 /home/gwyn"? Assuming gid and uid should be 500. Is there any way I can check what the uid and gid should be?

[tom_]

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grep gwyn /etc/group

should give you an optput like
group-name:x:group-number:user1,user2

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grep gwyn /etc/passwd

works in a similiar way for the user id

you can find more details here (and in a lot of other places too)
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialManagingGroups.html

[doktor5000]

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id username

shows you what you want to know all in one line. If you run that under the user in question, you don't even need to specify username.

[tom_]

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tom@localhost ~]$ id
uid=10001(tom) gid=10001(tom) groups=10001(tom),83(dialout)

nice to know, thanks Doc

[gwyn]

Thanks for all the help with those commands. The latest on this is that I checked my uid and gid in Fedora. Both 500 (as in Mageia). And I ran "chown -R 500:500 /home/gwyn" No error messages. But I still can't log in to Fedora. It hangs just before the splash screen would normally disappear and the desktop appear. If I press Esc I get various messages. Things like:

Display manager started and then stopped
Failed to start Wait for Plymouth Boot Screen to Quit
Reached target graphical interface
plymouthd: ply-array ... etc

My uid and gid had been 1000 in Fedora before I managed to muck things up. If you have any ideas, let me know. I'll try the Fedora forums.

Though I should probably avoid dual boot! Mageia seems to be good, now that I have the wireless working.

[srtxg]

"wrong permission" errors and "shared /home" pointed to a (quite commen) misconfiguration of uid across systems.
But you say that is correct; so either it is a problem of the whole system (regardless of the user) or maybe the hard disk has problems (particularly if permissions/ownership starts to change randomly on some files that points to a hard disk problem; have you corrupted files? can you run chkfs on your partitions?

if check of hard disk doesn't reveal anything, you may try creating from scratch a new user, and see if the problem happens with that user too.

[isadora]

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