FireFox/Mozilla and SMB homedirs

[LazLong]

I have an environment in which all home dirs reside on Linux and Solaris (soon to be killed) file servers. We have set up a NetBoot environment for our Mac users that serves home dirs using Samba. This has worked quite well, with one exception. FireFox (thru 1.5) and Mozilla (thru 1.7.12) appear to have a file locking issue involving the profile dir. Whenever one launches either of these apps, they think the profile is in use. By profile, I mean the default profile, one that is already created (and not in use), or one that you create via the ‘create profile’ button during the profile selection at launch.

Firefox gives the following error(default can be substituted by whichever profile is selected):

“Profile in use Firefox cannot use the profile “default” because it is in use.

To continue, close the running instance of Firefox or choose a different profile.”

Mozilla gives the following error(default can be substituted by whichever profile is selected):

“Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)
[nslProfileInternal.currentProfile]”

Creating a new profile results in the same message. I’ve checked to make sure it’s not a Unix permissions issue.

I have verified the following:

The user’s home directory is mounted (via Samba), and they have permission to write where the profile is/would be stored.

The user can read the default ‘template’ profile within the Firefox.app and Mozilla directores in order to create a new profile.

There isn’t a lock file in the user’s profile dir. Most certainly when there is no preexisting profile directory.

Using netatalk makes this go away. However, netatalk presents plenty of other problems, and would be just one more service that we would have to support.

I’ve run ktrace, and while I’m not a real programmer, it appears that it is doing the check for the .parentlock file, not finding it and then creating it. If someone would be interested in the ktrace.out, that could be arranged.

Both root and admin accounts can execute both Firefox and Mozilla without issue (actually, it doesn’t ask to choose the profile).
I have gone as far as to chmod a+rwx /Library and /Applications, to no avail.

This is driving me up the wall….I would really appreciate some help sorting this out! Anyone have any suggestions/pearls of wisdom?

[deemery]

I have the same problem with an all Apple/AFP set-up. A post over on Mozillazine.com yielded no responses.

And I agree this is -totally frustrating-!!!

The good news though is that this bug does NOT exist in the latest Thunderbird release for MacOS X.

dave

[elptacek]

Possibly useful: [url]https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/OpenAFSUserIssueshere[/url]

There is a conflict between the configuration file locking scheme used in Firefox and Thunderbird versions 1.5 and later, and the AFS locking implementation. This can result in Firefox and Thunderbird failing to start.
A temporary workaround for this is to delete the .parentlock file that is in the configuration directory…
* With Mozilla – rm -f ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/.parentlock
* With Thunderbird – rm -f ~/.thunderbird/*.default/.parentlock

[Author]

Posts