Firefox and NFS shared from Debian 9 Stretch

Question

Having problems migrating home directories from old server in Debian 8 jessie to new one with Debian 9 stretch

home directories are shared over nfs to several workstations. This has worked well for several years over different versions of debian on several physical and virtual servers.

Now, migrating to a new (physical) machine with bare stretch install and home on bare ext4 partition, no raid, no lvm, no nothing.

nfs configurations is the same on both machines. Default from install with the same exports line on both.

With Debian 9 everything works fine and fast except Firefox and Thunderbird complaining about 'file already in use' (for all users).

Client workstations are the same, just umount one server, mount the other and see the difference. Rebooting either workstation, server or both makes no difference.

Any idea of where to look?

In case it might be of help:

stretch:/home on /home type nfs (rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=524288,wsize=524288,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=X.X.X.X,mountvers=3,mountport=59929,mountproto=udp,local_lock=none,addr=X.X.X.X)

jessie:/home on /home type nfs (rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=X.X.X.X,mountvers=3,mountport=34380,mountproto=udp,local_lock=none,addr=X.X.X.X)

Thanks

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 26 '18 at 13:47

Issue at Hand

You are reporting that the error message you receive is similar to this post?

Possible Solution # 1

You can attempt to resolve this issue by deleting the .parentlock and lock files located in ~/.mozilla/firefox/[random string of alphanumeric characters].default/

Then verify that the processes have stopped by using pidof and pkill

pidof firefox // potentially it could be firefox-esr too
pkill [firefox(-esr) pid]

Repeat the same for thunderbird. Once you have stopped all associated processes and deleted the lock files you should be good.

Possible Solution # 2

Another possible solution is outlined here.

Use your preferred text editor to edit the profile.ini file located in ~/.firefox and ~/.thunderbird respectively.

in [General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=[Name of Profile, should be random string of characters].default

Remember to use the exact name of the thunderbird profile in the .thunderbird/profile.ini and the exact name of the firefox profile in the .firefox/profile.ini.

Additional Information

Here is a link to the Mozilla support site. It references Windows but the advice should be the same. Review this to verify if this is the same kind of issue. It also discusses the possible solutions.

I am also including a link to two different bug reports ( 1 2 ) that discuss a similar issue. The first link says to test functionality by using a different profile. In the second link they discuss an issue with integration with LDAP which you are reportedly not using but some of the steps to remedy the issue could apply.

Make sure that you firefox and thunderbird and fully up-to-date as well.

Conclusion

Please comment if you have any questions or issues with this answer. I highly suggest you read through each link I have provided thoroughly before attempting the commands. I appreciate feedback to correct any misconceptions and to improve my posts. I can update my answer as needed.

Best of Luck!