Red Hat Knowledgebase

Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3

Symptom:
You cannot simultaneously login from multiple machines using an automounted NFS directory and the GNOME desktop environment.

Solution:
The problem you are encountering is due to the way GNOME handles file locking with multiple concurrent logins to the same home directory. There is currently much discussion on this topic, and there are claims that this is fixed in Gnome version 2.4. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 currently ships with version 2.2, and later versions of GNOME are in the development and testing stages through our Fedora project.

Later versions of GNOME will eventually work their way into future releases of Enterprise Linux, but there is no guaranteed date as to when it will be available. In the meantime, multiple concurrent logins to the same home directory are unsupported with GNOME.