A Word of Caution for all who have suffered Multiple FF related System Crashes.
It appears the situation could be of more far-reaching consequence than first thought. Spent most of the day trying to put right the filesystem where my browser profile was situated. Did not realise anything amiss until couple of days ago. Several lines of
ext2 error messages displayed on the console would have been missed had I not been keeping keeping an eye on Flash from the console during a video download,
Today ran
fsck, and it looks like the filesystem was corrupted some two weeks ago
(corrupted inodes from files in browser profile directory all dated 11 Dec), but only now coming to light. Damage although worrisome not drastic
(inodes with incorrect block count, inodes sharing same blocks, same blocks claimed by multiple files, directories corrupted and salvaged). The only other affected directory was part of an
apt archive. The archive directory and the profile directory were the only ones being constantly updated, so most affected.
There seems to be a very real possibility that a browser related system crash (
in this case SeaMonkey, all the same Mozilla) occurred at sufficiently low level as to be able to screw up
ext2 file management. Might not be bad idea to run
fsck on filesystem containing profile, just in case.
To play safe, and there might be other ways of playing safe, have moved profiles to an expendable reiserfs
(said to be better for this kind of thing) partition. Very little extra effort required for
firefox:
Code: Select all
mkdir /expend/part/prof
firefox -profile "/expend/part/prof"
Restore extensions by opening
xpi file, generated by using FF extensions FEBE & CLEO on current profile. Using FEBE have been able to transfer all that was needed to start the new profile with a clean sheet.