Fierfox Profile manager, how to dump.

On Aug 3, 3:54 pm, ""
wrote:

For years I have used Firefox on Slackware with no problem. Now all of
a sudden a profile manager pops up every time I start Firefox. I jump
through all the hoops but the next time I start Firefox it pops up
again with no profiles available.  My bank only recognizes IE and
Firefox, not Chrome or Seamonkey or whatever.

Using pkgtool I dumped and reinstalled mozilla Firefox but that didn't
help. Should i just wipe out ~home/.mozilla/firefox?

Slackware 13.37 with Trinity, but same problem occurs under KDE4.

John Culleton

This turns out to be another problem that recurs on various
directories. All items in a directory and the directory itself loses
its ownerships and mods. All I see are question marks when I use su
and then ls -l.
If I chown etc. and chmod 777 as root everything is all right again.
This happened to ~/.mozilla and all its chlidren.

This is a recent but repeating occurrence.

John C.

On Aug 3, 3:54 pm, ""
wrote:

For years I have used Firefox on Slackware with no problem. Now all of
a sudden a profile manager pops up every time I start Firefox. I jump
through all the hoops but the next time I start Firefox it pops up
again with no profiles available.  My bank only recognizes IE and
Firefox, not Chrome or Seamonkey or whatever.

Using pkgtool I dumped and reinstalled mozilla Firefox but that didn't
help. Should i just wipe out ~home/.mozilla/firefox?

Slackware 13.37 with Trinity, but same problem occurs under KDE4.

John Culleton

Fixed the problem but found another. the directory ~/.mozilla and all
its subordinates lost its ownership and permissions. This has happened
before.
I used su, folleowed by chmod and chown. Everything is OK now.

John c

"" wrote:

All items in a directory and the directory itself loses its ownerships and
mods.

If everything is OK only a process with root priveleges should be able to
change ownership of a file or directory. However, if someone (or everyone,
like chmod 777) has write access to a directory he could do something like
this:

-8<
bash-3.1$ ls -al
total 26
drwxrwxrwx 2 henca users 72 Aug 3 23:23 .
drwxrwxrwt 85 root root 22064 Aug 3 23:23 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 henca users 6 Aug 3 23:23 test.txt
bash-3.1$ mv test.txt test.txt.tmp
bash-3.1$ cp -p test.txt.tmp test.txt
bash-3.1$ rm test.txt.tmp
rm: remove write-protected regular file `test.txt.tmp'? y
bash-3.1$ ls -al
total 26
drwxrwxrwx 2 henca users 72 Aug 3 23:24 .
drwxrwxrwt 85 root root 22064 Aug 3 23:23 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 browser users 6 Aug 3 23:23 test.txt
bash-3.1$
-8<

With the commands above it would seem as if an ordinary user were able to
gain ownership of a file previously owned by another user. To avoid this
the sticky bit (chmod +t) is usually used for directories where everyone
has write access, like /tmp.

However, if something is seriosly wrong with your filesystem, your kernel,
your RAM or your CPU, any kind of strange bug could happen.

regards Henrik
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc351(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:

In article
,
"" wrote:

If I chown etc. and chmod 777 as root everything is all right again.
This happened to ~/.mozilla and all its chlidren.

This is a recent but repeating occurrence.

Do not chmod 777 - it gives every user account the right to write to
your files, which may be contributing to the problem in the first place.

The .mozilla directory should be owned by you and have mode 700, i.e.
accessible only to you (and root). As long as that is the case, the
permissions of the stuff inside it don't really matter.

Also, given your strange symptoms, you probably want to use 'fsck' to
check for filesystem corruption.

- M.

On Fri, 03 Aug 2012 13:20:42 -0700, wrote:

On Aug 3, 3:54 pm, ""
wrote:

For years I have used Firefox on Slackware with no problem. Now all of
a sudden a profile manager pops up every time I start Firefox. I jump
through all the hoops but the next time I start Firefox it pops up
again with no profiles available.  My bank only recognizes IE and
Firefox, not Chrome or Seamonkey or whatever.

Using pkgtool I dumped and reinstalled mozilla Firefox but that didn't
help. Should i just wipe out ~home/.mozilla/firefox?

Slackware 13.37 with Trinity, but same problem occurs under KDE4.

John Culleton

This turns out to be another problem that recurs on various directories.
All items in a directory and the directory itself loses its ownerships
and mods. All I see are question marks when I use su and then ls -l.
If I chown etc. and chmod 777 as root everything is all right again.
This happened to ~/.mozilla and all its chlidren.

This is a recent but repeating occurrence.

John C.

Your hard drive is about to shit the bed.

Best get started with backups.


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