Distribution: Debian (Woody) Hardware Environment: PC Software Environment: Using SMBFS as home directory replacement, at least several versions of mozilla (using firefox-0.8-11), Samba 2.2.9 server Problem Description: We are trying to use SMBFS as a replacement for NFS mounted home directories. This worked well in older versions of Linux 2.4.24 with John Newbigin's patch ( http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/smbfs/smbfs-cifs8.patch ) My understanding is that some attempt was made to integrate this patch with the main kernel in 2.6 and also in 2.4.25/2.4.26. Everything seems to work 100% now except for mozilla which crashes with errorlevel 1 if the .mozilla or .firefox (depending which one you are running) exists. I recompiled mozilla to give more output and I see this error: ##!!! ASSERTION: Could not get profile directory lock.: 'Error', file nsProfile. cpp, line 1184 Break: at file nsProfile.cpp, line 1184 Steps to reproduce: 1. Install linux kernel >=2.4.25 making sure to include SMB filesystem support and Enable Unix Extensions. 2. Mount a user home directory as an smbfs filesystem. 3. Run Mozilla. 4. If you downgrade the kernel to 2.4.24 with the patch it try this it will work fine.
In the newest vestion of firefox 0.9.1 available at www.backports.org this problem does not appear. I am not sure if profile locking was disabled or not. I am not sure what bit of mozilla 1.7/firefox 0.8 profile locking code triggered the problem. Fcntl locking works fine on smbfs mounted filesystems in 2.4.25-2.6.7 kernels. There is a Lock_with_symlink method in the Mozilla code that looks very complicated. I have not been able to test this method in isolation. Since the newest version of firefox works for us, the problem has become a lot less urgent.
Have you seen this bug happen in recent kernels?
I have not tested it with the newest kernel. I will test and update. However I think the problem is nonexistent using NFS, possibly CIFSFS as well. I will install the newest kernel on a machine test and update as soon as I am able.
SMBFS is being deprecated, you should try CIFS instead (see http://lwn.net/Articles/183693/
Rohit, any update on this? Have you switch to CIFS, and do you have any problems with locking now? I suppose you're using recent kernels. Thanks.
Closing this bug, since no recent activity. Please reopen if still a problem.