[slurm-users] unable to create directory '/run/user/14325/dconf': Permission denied. dconf will not work properly.

[Prentice Bisbal]

I when I use  Emacs in an interactive session started with salloc like
this, for example:

salloc -n 1 -t 5:00:00 --mem-per-cpu=4000 --x11

a bunch of messages like this are spit out in the terminal window:

(emacs:2105): dconf-CRITICAL **: 17:40:01.497: unable to create
directory '/run/user/41266/dconf': Permission denied.  dconf will not
work properly.

When I ssh directly to the same compute node, and start emacs, those
errors aren't produced.

Any ideas why salloc produces those errors? Is it a cgroups thing? I
know emacs isn't a high-priority HPC tool, but I do have users who use
it when editing and debugging code in an interactive sessions - they're
the ones who reported this. These errors seem harmless, but I'd like to
make them go away, if possible.

I've done my share of googling on these error messages, but couldn't
find any solutions that applied to this case.

Any ideas?

--
Prentice

[Paul Raines]

This is most likely because your XDG* environment variables are being copied
into the job environment. We do the following in our taskprolog script

echo "unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"
echo "unset XDG_SESSION_ID"
echo "unset XDG_DATA_DIRS"



-- Paul Raines (http://help.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu)

[Prentice Bisbal]

Thanks. That's most likely it. I haven't had a chance to test yet.

Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov

[Prentice Bisbal]

That was definitely it! Thanks for the help.

Prentice