problem remote debugging

[Brendan Miller <catphive at catphive dot net>]

I'm having a problem with remote debugging where when debugging
locally I will launch fine, but when remotely debugging my program
will fail to open a certain text file, then segfault.

Both the host and client are running x86 RHEL4. The gdb version is
6.3.0.0-1.153.el4rh.

In the example below, I am trying to remote debug a fairly complicated
service that has it's own user "a_user".

On the remote machine I start gdbserver with:

sudo -u a_user gdbserver host:4000 my_binary

On the local machine I run:
gdb my_binary

Then within gdb I type:

target remote my_remote_machine:4000
run

Then I get the "failed to open file error" followed by a segfault.

On the other hand if I run this on the remote machine:
sudo -u a_user gdb my_binary
run

everything is fine.

Is one of my steps for remote debugging wrong? Would permissions be
different under remote debugging for some reason, and that would
explain why I can't open that file under remote debugging?

The service I"m trying to debug is heavily multithreaded, if that
makes a difference.