Monday, September 03, 2007

"Signing could not be verified"

This post is here mainly for the benefit of people who encounter the same problem and are looking for a fix in vain...

This post is about Ubuntu Linux and Firefox 1.5.

I decided to completely reinstall Firefox browser in my Ubuntu because it was getting rather sluggish, encumbered by many extensions I installed during the previous months. To this end, I completely removed the "firefox" package, backed up my ".mozilla/firefox" directory and then re-installed the "firefox" package. My plan was to install all the extensions I really need from scratch and use only the bookmarks.html file from the original configuration.

However, I hit a snag while installing Google Browser Sync extension. Firefox told me that "Signing could not be verified" and refused to install it. After more digging (and help from nice people), I discovered that, in Firefox preferences, under "Advanced / Security / Security Devices", I don't have the "Bulitin Root Module" item which should be there, and this is indeed the culprit. Now, this module needs the file "usr/lib/firefox/libnssckbi.so" in order to work. However, this file was not on my disk and, furthermore, was not part of "firefox" package!

After more digging, I discovered that this file belongs to package called "libnss3" which was installed on my machine. I reinstalled this package (the file magically re-appeared), added reference to this file into the "Security Devices" window and Firefox started working correctly.

I have absolutely no idea how could this file be removed. I certainly didn't do anything with /usr/lib/firefox/ files. I hope this fix helps someone who encounters this weird problem...

3 comments:

Evilda said...

I thought weirdly disappearing files was technology patented and implemented only by Microsoft ;-)

Anonymous said...

Obviously another aspect of Google's attempt to outdo them even in being Evil, if need be.

Anonymous said...

Filesystem damage? Maybe fixed at the next reboot, so that no trace remains by now...