Disable Mozilla Profile Manager
 

Here's my situation:

I am running K12LTSP 4.0 on top of Fedora.

I am setting up a kiosk for a webroom at my local school. The webroom is supposed to have 20 computers or so.

i've managed to lockdown most everything except for this one issue: Mozilla.

Since kiosk will have the same username, only one instance of Firebird can be run under the "default" profile. If I try to run multiple instances, I get that darned Profile Manager.

I tried using Mozilla 0.9.9 (the latest version that didn't use the Profile Manager) and it worked fine, but Kerberos did not work on it, and Kerberos is an integral part of our campus website. Students are unable to log into the school website using Kerberos.

I've also read the other threads on this issue, and the workaround is to simply make Mozilla open up a new window instead of creating a new instance. But this doesn't work in my situation, as there will be 20 different remote terminals. The "new window" command does not work, as the terminal will not see an instance of mozilla running in the background.

So the way I see it, there are only a few options left for me:

1) Try to get Mozilla 0.9.9 to work with Kerberos
2) Try to disable Firebird 0.7's profile manager
or
3) Lockdown Konqueror and have it run in a Kiosk mode.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi.

You could write a script to launch Firebird, then remove the lock file in ~/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxx.slt/

That'll let any number of instances of Firebird run, but you'd have to watch for corruption of config files, bookmarks etc.

Dave

Thanks, I'll try that.

===30 minutes later==

Here's what I did:

1) I opened up an instance of Firebird

2) cd /home/USER/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxxxx.slt/

3) "rm lock"

4) "/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird"

And it worked

However, I'm not a good script writer.

here's what I wrote for my script:

----

#!/bin/bash
#

rm /home/USER/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxxxx.slt/lock
/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird

-----


However, it says "cannot remove /home/USER/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxxxx.slt/lock; No such file or directory"

then it tries to run a second instance of Firebird

Does that script look right? What kind of permissions do I need to set for the script or for the directory structure?


Also, this script will have to work when you click on an icon in IceWM. I don't want any terminals to show up, as terminal access would be a security hole.

Hi again.

I would have:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird $* &
sleep 10
rm -f /home/USER/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxxxx.slt/lock

The -f will ensure that the lock will be removed (some systems have rm aliased to rm -i which asks the user whether or not he/she is sure he wants to delete. The -f overrides this).

The sleep 10 (you may want to change this) will allow 10 seconds for Firebird to start and actually create the lock file before deleting it.

The & allows Firebird and the sleep command to run at the same time.

The $* passes any arguments (usually web addresses) to Firebird, as normal.

I would name this script mozilla and put it in /usr/bin or somewhere else in the path. That way when any program calls mozilla (Evolution, for example, when clicking on links in e-mails) that script will be used instead of the original Firebird executable (or Mozilla, if it's on your system). Basically, make sure the script is run when you call mozilla from a shell. It will run without a terminal, and you can create menu entries or shortcuts on the desktop as you would for any other program.

Dave

I tried writing the script.

But the system seems to have trouble deleting the lock file in the mozilla-generated directory.

from the terminal, I had no problem typing this in

"rm -f /home/USER/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxxxx.slt/lock"

It worked perfectly

but if I ran the same exact command through the the script that I made, (the one you suggested to me), it still tells me "cannot remove /home/USER/.phoenix/default/xxxxxxxxx.slt/lock; No such file or directory"

I did some tests (make bogus text files) and tried to see if the script would delete those. For example, I would make a text file and place it in the /home/USER/ directory and it would delete just fine.

In fact, the script was able to delete bogus text files in the USER directory, the .phoenix directory, and the default directory. The funny thing is that it has trouble finding files in the xxxxxx.slt directory.

Maybe it has something to do with the read, write, execute permissions. If you are under KDE, click on properties, then find the permissions. Or from the command prompt, you can do "chmod +u:rwx" i think. Hope that helps. It's definetly something small like that though.

Have the directory open (in KDE or whatever) while you run the script. to see what's happening.

Firebird should create the lock just after it starts, then the script should remove it. If it works from the command line, it should work the same in the script.

Sounds stupid, but check your script to make sure you've got the path right.

On my system, the lock file appears extremely fast, so I doubt it's a problem related to not having a long enough 'sleep' in the script.

Post exactly what you have in the script, and what you get from doing

pwd

in the directory where the lock file appears.

Dave

^^thanks for all the help

here is my script in its full glory!


==============================
#!/bin/bash
# mozilla script


/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird $* &
sleep 10
rm /home/student2/.phoenix/default/3bmf13e7.slt/lock

===============================

and here is the output for pwd:

/home/student2/.phoenix/default/3bmfl3e7.slt

and here is the output of the script before it loads up the Firebird profile manger:

"rm: cannot remove `/home/student2/.phoenix/default/3bmf13e7.slt/lock': No such file or directory"


Same problem ensues.

:confused:

You've got an 1 in the script and an L in the pwd path.

3bmf13e7

5th character along.

Copy and paste the output of pwd into the rm -f command in the script, to ensure it's definitely correct.

Dave

OMG, I am such a :newbie:

That was what was wrong all along

thanks for all the help

Cool. Happens *all* the time. Glad it's working.

Dave