NX Server Problem – File Permissions Solved It!
Yesterday afternoon I had a hiccup on the networks and the NXMachine session I had from my desktop to one of the servers in the data center was disconnected. Unfortunately, attempting to get it back proved fruitless. No matter what I did, it was saying that there was an authentication problem. Yet just 10 mins ago I was connected and doing fine.
Reboot didn't help. I could SSH into the box, but I couldn't get the NXMachine session going. The UnixEng guy tried, but he wasn't all that good at debugging this software, so I had to work on another box for the rest of the day.
This morning I came in ready to try and solve this guy on my own. What I did was recheck everything. Make sure the box where it was working and the non-working box were set up right. I checked the scripts, the files - all seemed like it should work. Then I noticed the file owner in the /usr/NX/home/nx directory. It was owned by userID 999 and not the user nx. Oh... this couldn't have been it...
So I went through the entire /usr/NX directory comparing a working machine to a non-working machine. Every place I saw the userID 999 I did the chown nx and after I cleaned up those ownerships it worked! Sweet!
Lesson learned: check the file ownership and permissions.