Here's what I use: nss and nspr are in ~/code/nss and ~/code/nspr respectively. I export the following: export USE_64=1 export HOST=localhost export DOMSUF=localdomain I occasionally run: make nss_clean_all && make nss_build_all from the nss directory. I hardly ever touch nspr, except to do `hg pull -u`. I have the following in /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost That's enough that I can change to ~/code/nss/tests/ssl and run ./ssl.sh without problems. I also copy a recent file from tests_results/security/foo.12/ssl_gtests into my home directory. That lets me run the attached script, which is very convenient for debugging. That gets results in seconds, unlike the scripts, which take a lot longer just to get through setup steps. All I need to do is pass part of the name of the test as an argument (such as "SSLv2ClientHelloTestF") and it runs all the matching tests. Pass it a -d option and it runs gdb (-r for rr if you have that).