Occasionally, when I log into my Ubuntu server, the prompt says jon@jon-server:(unreachable)/$
. Running pwd
at this point returns (unreachable)/
, however echo $HOME
returns /home/jon
as expected. If I cd
then I get taken to my actual home folder.
What could be the reasons for this? It doesn't seem to cause any problems, apart from public key authentication with SSH (presumably if it can't see the home folder then it can't get to the .ssh
folder inside it). It seems to be consistent until restart - that is, every new shell will do this, until I restart, when it will either work normally or not.
This has been happening for at least the last few release upgrades, so not related to Oneiric. I selected the installer option to encrypt my home folder.
ssh
andscreen
.screen
as well, I just tried quitting the whole screen session and starting a fresh one, and the 'unreachable' thing had gone away. Still no luck with public-key auth, so perhaps that's an unrelated issuescreen
. Creating a new screen first results in a slight delay and then the directory in the prompt shows up as unreachable as does the output frompwd
. This is my first time using an encrypted home dir and it seems related.ls
shows the home dir contents, unencrypted and a simplecd
clears the problem. Also, I've only seen this in assh
session so far since that's the only way I access the machine.