*** NSPlugin Viewer runaway errors are causing .xsession-errors file to fill hard drive partition
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
nspluginwrapper (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: firefox
After running apt-get upgrade in the last 24 hours, I noticed that the backup of my home directory using backup2l -- an incremental backup program -- jumped to have a gigabyte for one days' increment. Alarmed by this, I investigated and seems that NSPlugin Viewer is writing the following lines to $HOME/.
$ ls -l .xession-errors
-rw------- 1 morse morse 610290736 2011-02-17 10:44 .xsession-errors
this file is normally 32-64k or such, and in less than 24 hours is now 610MB, entirely due to these identical entries:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING:
once i ran:
$ pkill -9 -f npview
the file stopped growing.
I am marking this bug as a security vulnerability because I believe it needs immediate attention and I know of no other way of informing canonical of the urgency of this matter. While technical not a security concern, runaway processes like this that fill up partitions can make machines and servers unusable. My apologies in advance if this was not the appropriate way to report this, but I'd rather error on the side of being a bit alarmist about this because, if this problem isn't somehow specific to my machine -- which I tend to doubt, because nothing has changed in my usage, installed programs, etc. other than running apt-get upgrade -- then a lot of less technical users could be very adversely affected. As such, I feel important that someone look into this quickly.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: firefox 3.6.13+
ProcVersionSign
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelMo
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Feb 17 10:47:53 2011
FirefoxPackages:
firefox 3.6.13+
firefox-
firefox-branding 3.6.13+
abroswer N/A
abrowser-branding N/A
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron:
PATH=(custom, user)
LANG=en_US.utf8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox
Hi,
ALSO IMPORTANT:
I forgot to include: I strongly suspect that this might be due to the update to Flash plugin, as these were the npviewer processes running while the .xsession-errors file was still growing:
morse@localhost ~> ps aux | grep npview nspluginwrapper /i386/linux/ npviewer. bin --plugin /usr/lib/ flashplugin- installer/ libflashplayer. so --connection /org/wrapper/ NSPlugins/ libflashplayer. so/2828- 1 nspluginwrapper /i386/linux/ npviewer. bin --plugin /usr/lib/ flashplugin- installer/ libflashplayer. so --connection /org/wrapper/ NSPlugins/ libflashplayer. so/23581- 3
morse 2886 11.3 0.8 161200 70220 ? Sl Feb16 213:54 /usr/lib/
morse 14338 0.0 0.0 7628 996 pts/2 S+ 10:44 0:00 grep --color=auto npv
morse 24032 1.0 0.6 128544 52444 ? S Feb16 18:23 /usr/lib/
Hope this helps. Ugh, I hate Flash. :) I long for the days when HTML5 or some other open technology takes over. :)
Best,
Doug