[K12OSN] Firefox hainging for some users

[Eric Harrison]

dahopkins at comcast.net wrote:
> Another issue has now come up. aaarrgghhh!!!   Some users, at random
> it seems, are being locked out of using firefox.  They get a message
> that firefox is in use.  This has been very sporadic (just a few
> users) for about 3 weeks, but recently is getting worse. Simply
> deleting .mozilla in their home directory allows firefox to start
> again.  So ... it is probably a lock on some file, but which one?
> Better yet, would upgrading to 2.0 fix this without breaking
> something else?  And ... random thought, could it be beagleindex
> grabbing the cache files or something?  The users do not show firefox
> running for them.  I have the purge_user option set, so logging
> on/off should kill any processes as well.  Anyhow, the tech teacher
> is now officially at wits end, as is this volunteer :)    Sorry for
> the problem, just aren't enough hours in my day at present to handle
> everything it seems.
> 
> Sincerely, Dave ...
> 


I'll think through an automated solution, but in the meantime here is a
manual one....


If the user's firefox process dies a sudden death, it can leave a stale
lock file around. If the user has no running firefox-bin processes (I'm
pretty sure "pkill -u <user's uid>  firefox-bin" would do the trick),
you can safely remove the lock file:

	rm ~username/.mozilla/firefox/*/lock


-Eric