440928 - ~/.mozilla/firefox on NFS (locking issue?) breaks everything, with no error messages.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 436737

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Graham Gower]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052912 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052912 Firefox/3.0

I have my home directory on an NFS server.
 (server is OpenBSD 4.1-current (GENERIC) #2: Sun Mar 18 10:49:08 CST 2007).
$ cat /etc/exports
/mnt/300G -mapall=grg:grg 192.168.0.100
$ cat /etc/rc.conf.local
nfs_server=YES          # see sysctl.conf for nfs client configuration
portmap=YES             # Note: inetd(8) rpc services need portmap too
lockd=YES

The client's /etc/fstab contains
192.168.0.90:/mnt/300G /mnt/300G nfs vers=3,rw,nosuid 0 0

When starting Firefox 3, the navigation bar is mostly non functional.
 - entering a url and hitting enter does nothing.
 - entering a url and clicking the green arrow does nothing.
 - the stop button is always greyed out.
 - the home button always goes to the firefox/google portal page, never the set homepage.
 - typing into the search box and hitting enter does nothing.
 - there are no back/forward buttons in the navigation bar.
 - there are no bookmarks.

This is a rather difficult to diagnose problem for a user not familiar with Firefox internals, as there is no error message presented to the user.

mzz on irc.mozilla.org tells me this is an sqlite issue with NFS locking.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Setup an OpenBSD NFS server without locking (unknown if other systems provoke the same issue)
2. Put your ~/.mozilla directory on an NFS mounted directory.
3. Start Firefox 3.
4. Attempt to use any part of the browser, you'll quickly find something that's nonfunctional.