Comment 85 for bug 212789

Revision history for this message
MSE (mseslacker) wrote :

I'd like to confirm sighting of the .gvfs "Transport endpoint is not connected" bug in Xubuntu 11.10 Oneiric.

The problem is as described in the post from 2008-06-20 in this thread:
Thunar won't show the contents of /home/ubuntu, due to the issue with .gvfs .
And ls -la of /home/ubuntu shows broken permissions for .gvfs :
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gvfs

Additionally, I see the same broken permissions on /etc/mtab and ~/.bash_history . I can "fix" the broken permissions on ~/.gvfs with "umount .gvfs". But, due to the corruption related to .bash_history , Thunar still will not display the contents of $HOME. It fails with:
Error stating file '/home/ubuntu/.bash_history': Input/output error.

Corruption in mtab prevents Thunar from displaying the contents of /etc :
"Error stating file '/etc/mtab': Input/output error."
On the command line, a simple attempt to see what's in mtab with "sudo cat /etc/mtab" results in:
cat: /etc/mtab: Input/output error

Now, I'm far from an expert in these matters.
But I suspect that losing I/O access to mtab, even for root, is not a good or desirable feature.

I'm running a more or less out-of-the-"box" Xubuntu Live install from a USB drive.
This is a stock Oneiric install, as installed to an 8GB Kingston DataTraveler drive by Universal USB Installer, with 2GB persistence file. It's running on an Asus branded Intel Atom eeePC netbook.

The workaround from this thread (posted originally on 2008-04-27 and re-visited more recently on 2011-11-07) has been reposted various places around the 'net:
fusermount -zu ~/.gvfs
from eg.,
http://razcx.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/cannot-access-gvfs-transport-endpoint-is-not-connected/ and
http://r3dux.org/2011/08/how-to-workaround-gvfs-transport-endpoint-is-not-connected-errors/

But this doesn't address whatever the underlying problem is with GVFS.
It appears that this has been a known bug in GVFS since early 2008, when this thread was opened, and an identical bug was reported in the Fedora 9 forums:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=452304