Ubuntu stock 14.04 Firefox crashes on machines with NFS mounted file systems

[Robert Heller]

At Thu, 31 May 2018 10:27:00 -0400 (EDT) Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:

> 
> At Wed, 30 May 2018 18:27:20 -0400 (EDT) "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > We have 9 workstations, running Ubuntu 14.04, that are booted diskless using 
> > drbl.  For the past few versions of Firefox, (since 58 0r 59) Firefox crashes 
> > on startup.  It is basically not usable, even with a fresh profile.  FF 
> > 52.6.0ESR does work however.  Oh, Chrome and Chromium don't work either (never 
> > have).  We have a pair of laptops that also have Ubuntu 14.04 on them, but 
> > they are setup to use their own internal disks.  FF works on them.  It 
> > *appears* to be some weirdness with NFS (I think), but I don't know what.  The 
> > NFS server for /usr is a VM running Ubuntu 14.04, but the NFS server for /home 
> > is running CentOS 6 (on the bare metal).
> > 
> > I have filed a bug report with the Mozilla people (and sent I don't know how 
> > many "Crash Reports"):  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1465604
> > 
> > This has become a *critical* problem and I cannot find any sort of good 
> > solution.
> 
> OK, I have totally confirmed things: Firefox 60.1 and Chromium both fail to 
> work properly (either totally crash or have a "tab" crash) on workstations 
> booted over the network (PXEBOOT) and with NFS mounted file systems.  On the 
> *same* physical machines, when booting from their local disks (same version of 
> Ubuntu: 14.04), everything works just fine.  It is obvious not hardware.  I am 
> not sure what to make of this problem.  

OK, a NFS /home partition is not the problem. I set the machines up to boot
locally, but mount /home via NFS. Things are working this way. This pretty
much means something is screwy with the root file system created by DRBL
(having /usr NFS readonly mounted is unlikely to be causing problems). The
weirdness is that no other applications have any problem with the DRBL created
root (and /etc and /var) filesystem, only the *various* web browsers.

> 
> > 
> 

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