We are in need of a privileged operation on the master to get the complete session information, not just the public stuff. One example is tlwebaccess which needs to verify the VNC port.
We need a better summary - what kind of problems does this actually cause?
The issue is ctccommon.get_tl_xvnc_processes() (and things using the same principle). Instead of getting the information needed from the session store, it tries to poke around the system using some heuristic to find the information needed. It is currently used by: - tlwebaccess: Needs the VNC port for a session - vsmagent: Needs the VNC ports for all local sessions - tl-notify: Needs the display number for all local sessions Getting the information from a reliable source is much more robust as the heuristics tend to have corner cases where they no longer work.
We've done fixes for this specific heuristic under bug 5573, bug 4132, bug 4750 and bug 4902. We also have the unsolved bug 5775. We've also gotten a report that isolating users in to a chroot breaks Web Access because this call starts failing.
Bug 6209 is also caused by the same principle. In that case we need the session key and our heuristic to find it on disk was failing.
These functions were moved to tlmisc/sessioninfo.py as part of Bug 7552.
