On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 09:31 +0100, Keith G. Robertson-Turner wrote: > Dan wrote: > > > I have an FC5 server which has exported /home via NFS. Client > > machines automount /home. > > Using /home as a network share is inherently insecure, and for reasons > you have just discovered, doesn't work very well. Maybe, but the whole point must be to have all the users info stored in one place. > > > Can multiple instances of firefox actually share a single profile? > > Can anyone else confirm this behavour? Yes I have had this problem, I think I left myself logged in on my server with Firefox running and then logged in on my laptop (which NFS mounts $HOME) and started firefox there as well. Then ssh to server and kill -9 firefox_pid!!! Not recommended. I could have started with a separate profile. I think firefox reaction has changed recently as it used to ask if I wanted to create a new profile. > > Firefox, and many other programs, use a locking mechanism to determine > if there is already another instance running, and (as you have > discovered) will not launch another instance if there is: > > ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/lock > > If you are sharing a $HOME directory among multiple machines or users, > you will invariably run into gotchas like this, and with many other > dotfiles too. I haven't had too many problems with other apps, evolution used to appear to have absolute path names included in the Contacts data base but that problem seems to have disappeared. > > Best solution: create a share on its own filesystem, or at least away > from $HOME, mount it, set the correct perms, set the required SELinux > contexts (if applicable), re-export, and reconfigure NFS. If I understand this correctly I can't see why this is a good move. What do you do if you 800 users who can sit at any of 200 different machines? > > IMHO FC5 desperately requires a simple tool (with GUI?) to simplify this > process, including opening firewall ports, etc. system-config-nfs just > doesn't even come close. > > -- > K. > John
