Firefox caching to NFS mounted home directories killing disk IO on file server

[Jeff Donaldson]

Okay, I added the local-settings.js. Firefox launches correctly, but it still isn't pulling the correct settings. It is pulling user preferences from /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/user.default/user.prefs. Is there a way to tell it to override user preferences and only use the config file specified? 

 -----Original Message-----
 From: "Donaldson Jeffrey" <jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us>
 Sent 11/16/2011 3:49:52 PM
 To: "Rippl, Steve" <rippls at woodlandschools.org>
 Cc: "Edubuntu Users Group" <edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
 Subject: Re: Firefox caching to NFS mounted home directories killing disk IO on file server

  Thanks Steve. I'll try adding a local-settings.js with the two general configs and seeing if that helps. Just out of curiosity, if one of your students goes to about:config or about:cache, do they see the settings?

 On 11/16/2011 01:22 PM, Rippl, Steve wrote: That does look fine.  So the one difference we have is that in /etc/firefox/prefs we put the 2 lines  

pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0); 

pref("general.config.filename", "firefox.cfg");  

in a separate file we call local-settings.js, rather than within the firefox.js.  I'm assuming everything in that folder gets read and this shouldn't make any difference, but it's the only difference I can see at this point. 

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Donaldson Jeffrey <jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us> wrote:

 I don't believe it to be a syntax issue, but here's the file before running the byteshift on it. 

 On 11/16/2011 12:43 PM, Rippl, Steve wrote: That should work, we have root:root 644 and that works.  Have you tried commenting out all the javascript in /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/firefox.cfg just to ensure it isn't a syntax error in the file itself causing it to complain? 

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Donaldson Jeffrey <jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us> wrote:

 Steve,

 Thanks for the reply. I have user and group setup with nobody:nogroup and 755 permissions. Is this wrong? How do you have your permissions setup? Currently we don't have it setup as a local app. Thanks for your help!

 Jeff 

 On 11/16/2011 11:31 AM, Rippl, Steve wrote:  

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Donaldson Jeffrey <jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us> wrote:

 I've been trying for a few days now to get Firefox to cache pages to /tmp locally for all users. I updated to Firefox 7, then edited the firefox.js in /etc/firefox/pref to include these lines -

 pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);   (supposed to tell FF not to worry about byteshift)
 pref("general.config.filename", "firefox.cfg");

 I then took a customized firefox.cfg file and placed it in /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1.

This is what we do (to lock down network settings and the like) and it works.  The only problems I can think of are permissions issues on  /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/firefox.cfg (can the user read it?) and whether you have an error in the JavaScript in the .cfg file?  Then again this is all run on the server for us (no local apps), are you running Firefox as a local app? 

For what it's worth, we found that many apps and even the Gnome desktop itself didn't work that well with nfs mounted home folders for the students.  We've since moved to having real local folder on each of the LTSP server (we have multiple load balanced) and we use csync (http://www.csync.org/) to synchronize those with the central file server on login/logout and every 10 minutes they're logged in.  Performance went up dramatically and the load on the file server is almost nothing. 

  -- 
 Steve Rippl
 Technology Director
 Woodland Public Schools
 360 841 2730

-- Regards, Jeff Donaldson Data Services Manager Newark Charter School (302) 369-2001 ext:425 jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us      

  -- 
 Steve Rippl
 Technology Director
 Woodland Public Schools
 360 841 2730

-- Regards, Jeff Donaldson Data Services Manager Newark Charter School (302) 369-2001 ext:425 jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us       

  -- 
 Steve Rippl
 Technology Director
 Woodland Public Schools
 360 841 2730

-- Regards, Jeff Donaldson Data Services Manager Newark Charter School (302) 369-2001 ext:425 jdonaldson at ncs.k12.de.us  

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