Fixing Firefox 3 with Shared /home

Ok, I finally made the plunge at the office and am moving all of our workstations over to a system where the /home directory is shared via GlusterFS (www.gluster.org) and I use NIS for central authentication. Everything works beautifully, but today I came upon a very strange issue related to Firefox 3. It turns out the FF is known to have issues with shared /home directories since they moved to SQLite. I found bugs reported with NFS, AFS, GlusterFS, etc.

Here is my down and dirty fix. Basically a script on login sets up a /tmp/firefox-$USER folder and symlinks ~/.mozilla/firefox there. On logout another script copies everything in /tmp back to a folder at ~/.mozilla/firefox-sync. I am using this on Ubuntu Jaunty and these instructions are for it.

Step 1: sudo nano /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

#!/bin/bash

# move the .mozilla/firefox directory if there
if [ ! -L "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" ]; then
   if [ -d "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" ]; then
           mv "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox-sync"
   fi
fi

if [ ! -d "/tmp/firefox-$USER" ]; then
   mkdir "/tmp/firefox-$USER"
else
   rm -rdf "/tmp/firefox-$USER/"
   mkdir "/tmp/firefox-$USER"
fi

chown -R $USER:$USER /tmp/firefox-$USER

# copy the users files over
cp -rpdf $HOME/.mozilla/firefox-sync/* /tmp/firefox-$USER/

# create the link
if [ ! -L "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" ]; then
   ln -s "/tmp/firefox-$USER" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox"
fi

Step 2: sudo chmod 755 /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

Step 3: sudo nano /etc/gdm/PostSession/Default

#!/bin/bash

#this moves all the data out of tmp back to the firefox.sync folder
if [ -d "/tmp/firefox-$USER" ]; then
        rsync -a --delete /tmp/firefox-$USER/ $HOME/.mozilla/firefox-sync/
fi

Step 4: sudo chmod 755 /etc/gdm/PostSession/Default

I hope this helps someone out there that is trying to remedy this behavior on their network