Tinderbox + console access on Redhat 7.2
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:25. 0 comments
The Mozilla build farm grew rather organically at the outset. We ended up with a lot of legacy tinderbox systems that were all installed and configured differently. This was especially true for Linux, which can be installed on just about any piece of hardware.
The tinderbox code requires an X server of some sort running on Linux so that it can fire up a new build and run basic tests on it, but there are almost as many ways setup to do this on the Linux tinderboxen as there are machines themselves.
Yesterday, we moved balsa-18branch, a Redhat 7.2 VM, to a new VM host, but attempts to restart the X server as the build user failed with a console ownership error: PAM authentication failed, cannot start X server.
This mailing list post got me most of the way there, but the proper PATH to the file that needed to be touch-ed was actually /var/run/console/USERNAME.
Maybe this will help someone else out, but really, I’m just recording it here so I don’t forget it myself next time I need to restart that VM.
