Corrupt .gvfs directory

[Razorblade]

Hello all,

yesterday I installed Fedora 12 x64.

Now everytime I start my Linux the .gvfs directory in my /home/Razorblade -dir is corrupted. So I have to reboot and start an Linux LiveCD, mount my home partition and delete this folder.
After that I can login normally.

Symptoms: I am able to login normally, start a browser, start my mail client, list the contents of subfolders of /home/Razorblade/... - everything fine. But as soon as I want to list the contents of my /home/Razorblade folder - nothing but this turning blue thing around the curser.
The command line does nothing after "ll /home/Razorblade", sometimes even crashes and closes.
As root I am able to do "ll /home/Razorblade" And this is what I get:

[...]
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gvfs
[...]

Now, when I log out and back in again, nothing happens - just a blue screen with that turning blue thing.

The same also happened with F11 x64 but after an update this error did never appeared again.

This is my fstab: (/home mounted on different disk)

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Mon May  3 16:22:55 2010
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
UUID=5fe4eeaf-13db-4568-8045-54bda7b3c3f1 /                       ext4    defaults        1 1
UUID=98c8a68a-b8ba-4940-8545-80047dc9aed1 /home                   ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=9b1e98ef-b1db-48ae-a253-e25becc7633b swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0

###
# user defined mount points
###
server-box:/Thunderbird	/home/Razorblade/Thunderbird	nfs4	rw	0 0
server-box:/Documents	/home/Razorblade/Documents	nfs4	rw	0 0
server-box:/Pictures	/home/Razorblade/Pictures	nfs4	rw	0 0

Does anybody know why this happens and how to avoid this?

[jpollard]

Not sure, but I have seen that strange display -

In my case it was caused by a security label mismatch on my home directory.

In another case it was due to a fuse mount failing, and not unregistering properly.

If it is due to a security label mismatch you may need to "touch /.autorelabel" and reboot.
This can take a while, but will clear up the problem. You should also have SELinux
warnings/errors recorded in your logs.

[Razorblade]

Thanks for your answer jpollard, but this didn't help.
I re-labeled my /home partition and also (just to be sure) disabled selinux. But it did it again :-(

[dd_wizard]

When I do ls -al as root in my user directory, I get the same thing:

[root@Mobile-PC gene]# ls -al
ls: cannot access .gvfs: Permission denied
total 708
...
d??????????  ? ?    ?             ?            ? .gvfs
...

There's nothing corrupt about my .gvfs, but it does have unusual permissions:

[gene@Mobile-PC ~]$ ls -ald .gvfs
dr-x------. 2 gene gene 0 May  4 11:04 .gvfs

I'm not sure if a corrupted .gvfs is your problem.

dd_wizard

[jpollard]

.gvfs is a FUSE filesystem mount. Root can't see the connection as it is part of
the private process memory - it isn't a normal filesystem. It also can't be backed
up by root as the contents change depending on what the user is running.

In my case, .gvfs appears empty - but I'm not sure what processes do put things
in there, but I believe they are gnome applications.

edit: It is for legacy gnome applications that do not support GIO
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS for details)

This was why I said problems can occur if the fuse mount doesn't get unregistered
properly. Usually this is because the fuse process aborts, leaving a mount, but
not the backend to handle file requests. Now exactly why the gvfs mount has
failed I don't know. There should be a log entry somewhere about a failure.

[Razorblade]

Ah okay. Then it is normal that root cannot see any details about my .gvfs. Interesting - didn't know about that.

Anyway, when this error occurs that I cannot browse my home directory I have to delete this .gvfs. So it has something to do with this.

@jpollard
I looked in /var/log/audit/audit.log (selinux-related) and grep'ed my /var/log/messages for anything that might have something to do with .gvfs or fuse
The only evidence of "fuse" I found was the fuse update after the installation of F12.

May  3 16:29:01 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.12)
May  3 16:38:28 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.12)
May  3 18:34:28 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.12)
May  3 18:39:40 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  3 18:41:48 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  3 18:43:19 Razor-Box yum: Updated: gvfs-fuse-1.4.3-7.fc12.x86_64
May  3 18:44:39 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  3 16:51:39 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  3 19:09:23 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  3 19:33:35 Razor-Box yum: Updated: fuse-libs-2.8.1-4.fc12.x86_64
May  3 19:33:47 Razor-Box yum: Updated: fuse-2.8.1-4.fc12.x86_64
May  3 19:36:40 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  3 19:40:42 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  4 15:35:26 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  4 15:43:46 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  4 17:22:26 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  4 20:42:20 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)
May  4 21:17:05 Razor-Box kernel: fuse init (API version 7.13)

[jpollard]

hm.

That begins to sound like a bug/oversight.

The .gvfs file system mount may be legacy - and once all applications have been
migrated to the GIO framework, the .gvfs mount should/could be done away with.

Its possible the project has completed the migration, but not completely removed
the .gvfs mount - leaving an incomplete FUSE mount. Something like this could
explain the problem.

[Razorblade]

It seems as if this is a known bug with fuse in Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=493565

Also other forum members are experiencing this issue: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...highlight=gvfs

I think I'll wait until this bug is fixed - hopefully in F12.

Thank you all