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We have a bunch of Ubuntu desktops with their home directories mounted as NFS shares. If an NFS connection is dropped, even for seemingly less than a second, pulseaudio loses its mind. The results either are a temporary soft-lock(with Ubuntu greying the screen out), crashes, and even a few panics here and there. You can see the myriad of NFS+pulseaudio problems with a simple Google search for those terms.

Due to this, I really want to just move pulse out of /home and put it somewhere more suitable or machine-specific.

For some reason, pulseaudio is all about security. I'm not really downing on this, even though I'm not sure why it's so important for a sound daemon. But their restrictions set are too constricting.

For instance, I tried symlinking ~/.pulse to /tmp and it will just return the following:

Failed to create secure directory: Too many levels of symbolic links

And pulse will quit.

Then, I ran into this thread which states envitronmental variables that can be set to direct pulse to other directories. So I tried setting up the pulse launcher(/etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop) to use the following Exec line:

Exec='PULSE_DIR="/tmp/$( whoami )-pulse"; PULSE_CONFIG_PATH=PULSE_DIR; PULSE_STATE_PATH=PULSE_DIR; PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH=PULSE_DIR; mkdir -p $PULSE_DIR && chmod 700 $PULSE_DIR && start-pulseaudio-x11'

I even tried setting the permissions and owner to something I thought pulse would be happy with. I gleaned what I thought it wanted from the stacktrace posted in bug 662(more info about this problem there, as well).

However, this set of commands results in pulse throwing the following and then exiting.

Failed to create secure directory: Permission denied

Now since the developers seem generally unwilling to accept any of this as a problem, I need to find some way to work around this. If not, I'm going to remove pulse, which isn't ideal for the sake of future compatibility on these machines.

We've already wasted a ton of man hours on tracking down and trying to solve this issue and it's time to move on.

If anyone has any ideas on workarounds or has any more information on this problem, I would really appreciate it.

PAStheLoD
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Mike Shultz
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  • Also, since my rank is so low on this site, I couldn't create the pulseaudio tag. Someone else may want to add that. – Mike Shultz Aug 10 '12 at 16:31
  • PulseAudio is a network-capable sound daemon, so remaining secure makes some sense. – Michael Hampton Aug 10 '12 at 19:20
  • Fair enough, but security shouldn't require fitting into one way of doing things, if you ask me. – Mike Shultz Aug 10 '12 at 19:44
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    It seems a bit stupid that a "network-capable sound daemon" doesn't work properly in a "standard" (i.e., one that has been around for decades) network environment... – Majenko Mar 28 '13 at 15:30

3 Answers3

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The PulseAudio developers don't seem to like a lot of things, one of which is this workaround:

Use PulseAudio as a system daemon, rather than running it per-user.

As I mentioned, the developers don't particularly recommend this, for their own reasons. If you do this, be aware of the potential security impact on your systems.

Michael Hampton
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A little late, but maybe it helps nevertheless.

A bindmount to some other folder (outside your NFS mount) is your friend. I just tried it sucessfully.

mount -o bind /tmp/.johndoe_puls /home/johndoe/.puls

Of course, this can only be done by the root user. The mountpoint of the bindmount gets the same permission set as the mount target.

Regards, Jörn

Jörn Frenzel
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Your script has several mistakes. When you want to move pulseaudio directories out of home directory, then you have to add following code to your ~/.bash_profile config file:

PULSE_DIR="/tmp/$( whoami )-pulse"
mkdir -p $PULSE_DIR && chmod 700 $PULSE_DIR
export PULSE_CONFIG_PATH=$PULSE_DIR
export PULSE_STATE_PATH=$PULSE_DIR
export PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH=$PULSE_DIR

Regards, Jiri

JiriHnidek
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