[Bug 585061] [NEW] [PATCH] Segfaults in nsUrlClassifierDBService.cpp when homedir is inaccessible

[Daniel Richard G.]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: firefox

This concerns firefox 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4 in Ubuntu Lucid.

I use Firefox on a system in which home directories are served from an
AFS file server. When a user's Kerberos authentication expires, access
to the entire home directory is cut off, and all attempts to read or
write to it fail with EACCES.

This occurs regularly on my workstation: I stay logged in for weeks at a
time, with a more-or-less permanent instance of Firefox running, and
every night after I leave work my authentication expires and Firefox
sits for a few hours without any access to its configuration files under
~/.mozilla/. When I return in the morning, I renew my authentication,
and my home directory becomes accessible again, but by this point
Firefox has usually vanished without a trace.

I debugged this problem using a local build of the Firefox deb source,
and have found where the segfaults are occurring: All of them appear to
be in nsUrlClassifierDBService.cpp. The code assumes in a couple of
places that mConnection is non-NULL, but every time the browser crashes
on me, that assumption did not hold.

I am attaching a preliminary patch that, so far, has eliminated the
crashes. I now find Firefox still hanging around every morning, with a
number of "A script has become unresponsive..." dialogs that are easily
cleared away.

** Affects: firefox (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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[PATCH] Segfaults in nsUrlClassifierDBService.cpp when homedir is inaccessible
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/585061
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