ecryptfs-users team mailing list archive

[Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Alberto Bertogli
<albertito@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> A friend is having a very strange bug, that I think (I'm not sure) it might be
> ecryptfs related. She has Ubuntu 9.10 (installed 9.04, then upgraded) and uses
> ecryptfs to encrypt her home directory (using the standard Ubuntu setup).
>
> Sometimes (no idea when or why) the following happens: using GNU screen, you
> open a new shell (ctrl-a c) bash prompt says it's in '/'; pwd says it's in
> '/'.
>
> ls shows the contents of her home directory. You can do cat <file in her home
> directory> and it works doing cat <file in /> does not work.
>
> I've done a couple of straces and the behaviour is consistant with the current
> directory being her home, but getcwd() returning '/'.  I verified this also
> using Python's os module, just in case it was a tool issue.
>
> I can also cd <dir inside her home> and pwd shows '/<dir inside her home>',
> with the same behaviour as before. While I'm in there, I get the same
> behaviour as before (cat works, open works, etc., but getcwd() returns the
> wrong directory). However, if I do 'cd /<dir in her home>' I get ENOENT.
>
> The problem goes away if I do 'cd' or 'cd /<her home dir>'
>
> >From what I can see, it looks like getcwd() is using '/' instead of $HOME.
>
>
> At the moment I can reproduce this at will by creating new shells inside an
> existing screen. It does not happen in new terminals. She said this has
> happened before, but has no idea when or why (although it happened also in
> 9.04). I'm not sure if after she reboots or closes this screen it will be so
> easy to reproduce (it looks like the shells are inheriting this behaviour from
> the screen process).
>
>
> If you need any further information (or want me to test anything), please let
> me know.

Hi Alberto,

First, my apologies for taking so long to respond.  Your note (along
with a couple of others) got lost, having been picked up by
Launchpad's filtering.

In any case, I have actually seen this maybe 3 times in the last few
years.  It is a strange bug, indeed.  Each time it happened, I had
very recently (within that screen session) done an apt-get
dist-upgrade.  I think it's somehow related to that -- possibly the
changeover to a new libc library or something.

If you're still seeing this, please open a bug at
http://bugs.launchpad.net/ecryptfs, and please provide as *much*
information as possible about how to reproduce the error.

Thanks!

-- 
:-Dustin

Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Core Developer