Bug in gdm under SuSE 10.3 (and perhaps in other Linux distributions)

Anyone who is running Linux with GNOME in VMWare might have come across a rather serious problem with gdm lately after doing an upgrade of the system with the latest patches. I am running OpenSuSE 10.3 and installed the latest patches just a few days ago. The patch installation went fine but next morning when I tried to reboot my Linux image, gdm failed to start up. Gdm initially started up but then crashed just before or shortly after showing the login prompt. When gdm was started the first time it ran a few seconds longer before crashing. You won't even have enough time to login. On subsequent restarts, GDM crashed almost instantly for every restart attempt. It attempted 6 restarts, then raised the following error to the console, slept for 2 minutes and started over again:

"The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds, it is likely that something bad is going on. Waiting for 2 minutes before trying again on display:0"

The log in /var/logs/Xorg.0.log should had the following lines at the end:
Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80e6d81]
1: [0xffffe420]
2: /usr/bin/X [0x817b185]
3: /usr/bin/X(CompositePicture+0x150) [0x8161be0]
4: /usr/bin/X [0x8167a1f]
5: /usr/bin/X [0x8164d75]
6: /usr/bin/X [0x815809e]
7: /usr/bin/X(Dispatch+0x1af) [0x808f68f]
8: /usr/bin/X(main+0x47e) [0x807717e]
9: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0) [0xb7d1ffe0]
10: /usr/bin/X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x1e5) [0x8076501]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11. Server aborting

After various tries I was still unable to resolve the problem but found a way to bring up the X Windows system. I had to login as root from console and run gdm -stop. The next time gdm was restarted (after the 2 min had elapsed) it did come up fine.

So I went on the web to see if someone else had encountered the same problem as well. When I checked SuSE's bug database, I realized I was not the first one to encounter this issue. A bug was already raised https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=350318.

Apparently the culprit is a patch to the Control-Center2 (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=337434) that seens to break gdm.

This is quite a severe problem and only seems to affect Linux running inside VMWare. I am not yet sure if other distributions are effected as well, most likely they are.

simple Ruby SOAP client

I am fairly new to Ruby and am quite amazed how simple and elegant this language can be. In particular I was surprised how simple it is to write a SOAP client in Ruby. Where in most programming languages even a simple SOAP client takes about two screenshots of code (if not more), a Ruby SOAP client can be boiled down to these few lines of code:


#soap_client.rb
require 'soap/wsdlDriver'

WSDL_URL="file://C:/hello_world.wsdl"

soap = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(WSDL_URL).create_rpc_driver("SOAPService", "SoapPort")

#invoke WSDL operation sayHi
result = soap.sayHi()
printf "Returned message reads: " + result + "\n"

#invoke WSDL operation greetMe
result = soap.greetMe("New Ruby User")
printf "Returned message reads: " + result + "\n"


In this code I am referring to a wsdl definition that defines two WSDL portType operations named sayHi() and greetMe() that both return a string.
In essence the code boils down to 4 lines of code that are of relevance. Of course this code is everything but object oriented and it is somewhat unfair to compare it against a properly implemented SOAP client written in other object oriented programming languages. Still this example is surprisingly simple and straight forward. I have used this code a number of times in order to quickly implement a SOAP test client. All you need to change is the name of the business method you actually want to invoke on (plus their arguments) and the location of the WSDL file. Thanks to Ruby you don't even need to recompile your changes.
Sure, most SOAP toolkits also provide a way to generate a fully working client and server without requiring you to write any code. Still the generated code is tied to the WSDL interface. Changes to one of the operation signatures typically require a regeneration of your test client/server.
Ruby rocks (and I am just starting to hit the tip of the iceberg)!