July 27, 2005 3:58 PM
I had set up Samba last week so that I could share files with my brand
new Thinkpad1 T42 over wi-fi. I still haven't installed any sort of
Linux on it. The wireless network was working great, I could get a
response for ping and all. But WinXP on the Thinkpad kept on
complaining about an incorrect pathname whenever I tried to access the
Samba share. After the failed attempt at setting up Samba, Firefox
simply wouldn't start.
I got the following error message while running Firefox:
/usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4/run-mozilla.sh: line 451: 5062 Segmentation fault
"$prog" ${1+"$@"}
All other applications which use the network including mozilla, yum,
wget, etc. also began to give me segmentation faults. It was
scary. Googling returned way too much information. To all those who do
not know, I'm running Fedora Core 2 kernel version 2.6.10-1.771_FC2.
In the end, I decided to debug firefox using GDB. Simply running
gdb firefox won't get the job done because
/usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4/firefox is a shell script. Running gdb firefox-bin
won't help either. Run the following commands to debug Firefox:
# change /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4 to the path where firefox is installed cd /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4 ./run-mozilla -g firefox-bin -d gdb
Single stepping using GDB showed that the segmentation fault occurs
when _nss_wins_gethostbyname_r () from /lib/libnss_wins.so.2 is
executed.
Similarly, running GDB on wget, yum etc showed the same thing. Apparently, this is a documented bug.
The solution is to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and remove2 wins from
the hosts line. According to the bug report, there should be no
problem if your local network is up and running. Otherwise, you'll
have to remove wins from nsswitch.conf.