CentOS/RHEL 8 & DBus

Open OnDemand
#1

We’ve been seeing issues with xconfd in OOD apps due to how dbus spawns differently under RHEL 8. The effect is that xfwm4 doesn’t run and resulting apps are windowless within the VNC session. The fix I’ve used is to manually load dbus in the session by executing the following in the script:

eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax)

My current test has this in an app’s script but I’m planning to move it into the the script_wrapper section of the cluster’s config.
Just wondering whether anyone has seen anything similar and if so, how have you resolved it?

#2

Hi! Thanks for also commenting on the GitHub issue!

I have the bug open at force PATH for desktops · Issue #700 · OSC/ondemand · GitHub but we kind of want to have our cake and eat it too. That is, we want to execute the correct dbus-launch but also allow for users to have their anaconda environment setup.

In any case, something I’m trying to get going is community members upvoting (or downvoting) tickets on github to get a sense of what the community’s looking for. So upvote the github ticket so we know how to prioritize it!

#3

fyi, ran into something similar/related for xfce desktop.

i inserted a
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
in the xfce desktop script before any xfce commands

this seems to work, and a systemd --user session is started

#4

I’ve tested under RHEL 7 & 8 and this solves the issue on both - many thanks as it’s far neater than my previous solution!

#5

Thanks! Our use case is I think far simpler (i.e. no Conda!) and unsetting the env var as per @stdweird’s suggestion worked for us.