So today I decided to switch over to the mainline Firefox 4.0 Beta from the Minefield dailies I’ve been using. Â I started to copy the new Firefox.app directory over the existing one in my Applications folder and immediately was met with a:
‘The operation can’t be completed because the item “libsmime3.dylib” is in use.’
Well shit, whats holding onto that lib. Â Turns out that it was my Cisco VPN Anywhere Agent, aka vpnagentd. Â So I go ahead and do a:
‘sudo killall vpnagentd’
Ugh and of course it restarts automatically before I can copy the files over. Â So what now. Â Oh yeah, it runs as a daemon so I need to use my old friend launchctl to unload it. Â The command for this is:
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.cisco.anyconnect.vpnagentd.plist
w00t! Now the files copy over with no problem. Â Now I need to put AnyConnect back into place. Â This can be done with:
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.cisco.anyconnect.vpnagentd.plist
That should do it, Firefox 4 Beta up online and working again.
That was 15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. Hopefully this post saves you 10.
This saved me more than ten! Thanks.
Thanks man! You def saved me a ton of time and frustration!!!
Sounds like my problem but I’m not particularly skilled on the mac side. What do I launch to use the sudo… command with?
nevermind. I got it and now loaded Firefox 4 beta. Thanks…
THANK YOU. I have been searching all over the place and everything points me to the Silicone Chaos article which did not help. You saved me a lot of frustration!
Glad it helped, did you have the same error message or something else?
Thanks! It help me too. All the search hits gave ‘sudo killall vpnagentd’. But, the daemon restarted as you said. Saved me 10. Same message, too.
Oh, hell… You get a BIG THANKS. Had the exact error. Found others with incomplete solutions — you NAILED IT!
Thank you!
Holy crap, I was killing myself with that one. THANKS FOR NOTHING CISCO ANYCONNECT VPN. 🙂
Hi,
Having a bit of a problem. Followed your advice (thanks!) and got Firefox installed fine, but now after reloading the cisco launch daemon, I can no longer connect to our work VPN.
I’ve tried uninstalling and re-installing the anyconnect client with no luck. Any suggestions?
Fixed my problem perfectly. Thank you so much for posting this.
WOOHOO! \o/
Thank you for the solution. Worked like a charm. Question so I can learn more: how did you find out which process/service was using that library?
Thanks! Worked great!
Worked perfectly with Firefox 6.0 installation! Thanks.
Thanks! Saved me more than 10 minutes of my life!
Thank you so much — that seems to have done the trick.
thanks! still relevant with firefox 8 on osx 10.5.8
Man thanks!!!! i was going nuts, gave up on updating firefox for a few days, was trying to figure out what was causing the file to remain open
Wow. It really helped me a ton of minutes, leave alone the frustration and agony.
Thanks much. I was upgrading to Firefox 10 and ran into the same issue but with another dynamic library. A quick “lsof /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libnspr4.dylib” revealed vpnagentd as the culprit, and a quick googling revealed your posting as the quick and easy cure.
Keep on posting!
Wow. Wasted at least an hour trying to figure out what was wrong, found a link to this post, 5 minutes later, Firefox is installed and running and I can still connect through my vpn. THANK YOU!