2.8 KiB
Per Host Default Profile for Firefox
Problem Description
Firefox refuses to start with
if the user has the home directory on the network (AFS or NFS) and has Firefox already running on one computer and tries to start it on another computer.
A solution is to have an individual default profile for each host.
Solution for Red Hat 7
Add to the bottom of ~/.bash_profile:
if ! mountpoint -q ~/.mozilla/firefox; then
mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/firefox{_$(hostname --fqdn),}
bindfs --force-user="$(id -un)" --force-group="$(id -gn)" -o nonempty,no-allow-other ~/.mozilla/firefox_$(hostname --fqdn) ~/.mozilla/firefox
fi
and it will be ready with the next login. You may also run this code directly on the terminal if you wish to have it ready for the currently running session.
Solution for Red Hat 8
Create the file ~/.config/systemd/user/private-firefox-profile-per-host.service with following content:
[Unit]
Description=Private Firefox Profile per Host
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=true
ExecStart=bash -c 'if ! mountpoint -q "%h/.mozilla/firefox"; then mkdir -p "%h/.mozilla/firefox"{_%H,}; bindfs --force-user="$(id -un)" --force-group="$(id -gn)" -o nonempty,no-allow-other "%h/.mozilla/firefox_%H" "%h/.mozilla/firefox"; fi'
ExecStop=fusermount -u %h/.mozilla/firefox
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
To have it started automatically a symlink is needed from
~/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/private-firefox-profile-per-host.service to ../private-firefox-profile-per-host.service, e.g. to be created with given user:
systemctl --user enable private-firefox-profile-per-host.service
It will be available after the next login. To start it immediately run
systemctl --user start private-firefox-profile-per-host.service
Technical Discussion
The solution does a bind mount from ~/.mozilla/firefox_$FQDN to ~/.mozilla/firefox (and ensures that both directories exist). As normal user without special admin privileges it is not possible to do a normal bind mount. The alternative used here is bindfs, a tool implementing bind mounts as user space tool (FUSE) and runs without special privileges. By default bindfs is not available, but I will make it soon to be installed everywhere with by Puppet.
One can install both the RHEL 7 and the RHEL 8 solution at the same time, they are tolerant to each other.
The special solution for RHEL 7 is required because Red Hat patched out the support for systemd --user. An issue with this solution is that the bind mount is never cleared. It is ensured that there is only one per user, but this one stays until the machine shuts down or it is manually unmounted. But the the tool is slim and uses less than 1 MB resident memory per instance.