It turns out there was a problem with my /tmp
folder permissions. The following fixed the problem:
Steps that I followed are:
user@host-$: chmod 777 -R /tmp
user@host-$: chmod o+t -R /tmp
user@host-$: ls -l tmp
drwxrwxrwt 2 user group 4096 2009-11-21 17:01 tmp