In a workflow that predates my tenure here, my users are running multiple Xvnc servers on multiple machines. Each user's home directory is mounted by all of the machines via NFS. They're having relatively frequent problems of various sorts, including, most frequently:
- Session stops accepting mouse and keyboard input
- Applets become unresponsive
- Panel refuses to accept new applets
These issues are usually recoverable. Panel problems tend to be resolved by killing gnome-panel. Input response tends to have a variety of possible solutions, including killing xscreensaver (don't ask why xscreensaver is running on an Xvnc server >:( ), restarting metacity, and maybe others.
First, I suspect that the root cause of these problems is the fact that there are multiple Gnome sessions all accessing ~/.gnome* at the same time. Can someone confirm or deny that?
Second, is there any desktop environment (that is, more than just a window manager) that supports having multiple sessions running at the same time?
The root problem here is that no one engineered this workflow; people just kind of threw it together ad-hoc. I want to move people away from this system, probably via xpre, but I'd like to have multiple possibilities to present when they tell me that they can't possibly live without Gnome's clock or some other ridiculous request.
