Can I bypass the lockfile stuff?
Red Hat Linux 8.0 contains an experimental patch that allows you to set the environment variable “GCONF_LOCAL_LOCKS=1” – do this in a script in /etc/profile.d for example. Then locks will be kept in /tmp. This has two important caveats. First, there is a security flaw where users can keep each other from logging in by creating someone else’s lock file. YOU SHOULD NOT ENABLE GCONF_LOCAL_LOCKS IF THIS IS A PROBLEM FOR YOUR SITE. However, it’s “only” a denial of service attack, and the user would have to leave the problem-causing file owned by themselves, so you could track them down and get angry. Second, preferences notification won’t work between machines; you will get “last machine to write preferences wins” behavior instead of “state is shared” behavior. You can probably live with that. This patch will probably be in GNOME 2.2, ideally with the denial-of-service issue fixed.
