crash on login with mounted home drive

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 15 Mar 2020 11:41:36 +0000, ltcddata wrote:
> Been using freebsd since 7.1, and by 7.2 added in a drive for /home/user
> which has been fine. However I had to stop for around a year around
> 10.2, but when I came back on 11.2 suddenly logging in with KDE/Gnome
> XFCE would grind the computer to a halt and crash either during login or
> within 30 seconds. This does not happen if I boot up using only the root
> drive, and use the standard /home/user. Currently Mate is the only
> desktop I have which works with a mounted /home/user drive, but does
> anyone know what is causing this? 

This might be a filesystem-related issue. Boot the machine
into single user mode and perform a forced check for all
partition (system disk _and_ home disk); if needed, run
fsck twice (see summary message). See "man 8 fsck" for
additional options that you might need ("fsck -yf <partition>"
is a typical application, but always be sure that you
are comfortable with what "-y" means and does).

A little sidenote: Check if you have

	background_fsck="NO"

in /etc/rc.conf; this will make sure you'll always boot
into a clean and consistent filesystem environment.

Furthermore, check that the mountpoint for the home disk
is an empty (!) directory.

There also could be an additional problem:

Let's say, you have /usr/home/bob as your home directory,
with /home being a symlink to /usr/home (which is the default
setup on FreeBSD). Now you remove /home, make it a directory,
and mount a 2nd disk into that directory; /home/bob is the
home directory now. Depending on what desktop environment
you're using, they tend to hard-code (!) directory names
into their configuration files, so maybe some IDE does
expect /usr/home/bob/.config/blah/something.cfg to exit,
but that file actually is /home/bob/.config/blah/something.cfg,
and it's on the 2nd disk, which, coming back to my initial
suggestion, also has a filesystem defect... ;-)

A third option could be a crash triggered by hardware
problems. If that should be the case, test your RAM with
a tool like memtest86, and maybe also your processor, as
well as the voltages of the power supply. However, that
case is a rather rare one, so you should probably go with
the filesystem check first.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...