Follow these procedures if firefox fails to open for you on a CSE machine.
Is your quota full?
See https://wiki.cse.buffalo.edu/services/content/unixlinux-accounts for details on checking your quota and freeing up space
Was firefox left running somewhere else?
Because most CSE machines mount the same home directory space, if firefox is left running on a machine, the lock files it leaves in place could confuse another machine.
To check if you have this problem, SSH to a machine you may have logged in to recently (ex. dragonforce, styx, nickelback) and run the following command:
ps -u $USER | grep -i firefox
If the command returns a value that resembles:
823 ? 00:00:13 firefox
you may then use the
kill command to kill off the process on that machine:
kill 823
In this example, 823 was the process ID number returned by the PS command. Your process ID number that gets returned will most likely be something different.
Remove old or defunct lock files
If Firefox crashes, it might leave behind lockfiles that will prevent you from initiating a new Firefox session. You must clear these vestigial lockfiles in order to launch a new session:
- Change directory to your personal Firefox directory:
% cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/
- Change directory to your default profile directory. It will be of the form: [random character string].[userid | default]:
firefox% cd mdkcdo68.cwmiller/
- Remove the two files called lock and .parentlock:
mdkcdo68.cwmiller% rm lock .parentlock
- Restart Firefox:
% firefox &
