Home directory different console vs. telnet

Hello,

One of the customers I suppport has a interesting problem I've never seen. I've searched the forums and found nothing relevant, so I'm hoping somebody can point me in the right direction.

He is running Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 on a Dell PC. He also uses Sun workstations. He has a home directory on the network which he gets when logging on to a Sun through the automounter. When he logs into his Linux machine he is supposed to get the local home directory in /export/home1.

The strange thing is - if he telnets into the linux box, or if I go on there as root and su - to his userid, he gets the local home directory as he should. But if he logs on at the console with Gnome he gets the automounted network home directory. He can cd into his local homedir just fine, but his home directory is set to the network one.

Does anybody have an idea how this could be happening? My first thought is something with login scripts or automounter/nfs setup. But those should affect telnet sessions as well as console logins if they were wrong. I checked through the .gconf directory but didn't find anything; however I'm not very familiar with gnome so I could have easily missed something there.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Ralph

We found a solution to this that worked on a test machine. I'll post it here in case anybody finds this ticket while searching on a similar problem in the future.

We copied the entire local home directory for the user having the problem to the test machine. After doing that we could re-create the problem on the test box. We could log in as him and get the directory mappings screwed up as described above. We proceeded to delete the following files/dirs from his home directory:

.gconf
.gconfd
.gnome
.gnome2
.gnome2_private
.gnome-desktop
.gtkrc-1.2-gnome2
.nautilus
.metacity

After that we logged out and back in again and the home directories mapped correctly. So apparently somehow his gnome config was screwed up in a way that made his home dir mapping incorrect. I have no idea how that happened, but deleting these objects and letting gnome re-create them on the next login fixed it.