Issues starting, restarting and accessing neo4j on Debian 8.1 intermittently.

[John Haggerty]

I am having what seems to be a common problem for a number of people. This has a few different variants however.

I had a forced restart on my Debian 8.1 instance that I have on Virtualbox as a guest OS on Windows 10.

sudo /etc/init.d/neo4j start

[....] Starting neo4j (via systemctl): neo4j.serviceJob for neo4j.service failed. See 'systemctl status neo4j.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details.

 failed!

 sudo journalctl -xn

...

When doing what I asks I get the following: "Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya neo4j[13667]: Starting Neo4j.

Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya neo4j[13667]: WARNING: Max 1024 open files allowed, minimum of 40000 recommended. See the Neo4j manual.

Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya neo4j[13667]: /usr/share/neo4j/bin/neo4j: line 149: /var/run/neo4j/neo4j.pid: No such file or directory

Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya systemd[1]: neo4j.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1

Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Neo4j Graph Database server.

-- Subject: Unit neo4j.service has failed

-- Defined-By: systemd

-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel

-- 

-- Unit neo4j.service has failed.

-- 

-- The result is failed.

Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya systemd[1]: Unit neo4j.service entered failed state.

...

"

Based on some feedback from stackexchange posts I have seen doing the following should have fixed it: "sudo mkdir /var/run/neo4j sudo touch /var/run/neo4j/neo4j.pid sudo chmod 666 /var/run/neo4j/neo4j.pid

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘sudo’: File exists

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/var/run/neo4j/neo4j.pid’: File exists"

That failed.

I also tried to manually remove the /var/run/neo4j/neo4j.pid file, trying it, removing the entire directory, that failed, and also removing the store_lock file stored on the system via "sudo rm -f /var/lib/neo4j/data/databases/graph.db/store_lock"

That failed with the same results. Any ideas?

Thanks for the help in advance.

[ben.but...@neotechnology.com]

On Thursday, June 9, 2016 at 12:49:40 AM UTC+1, John Haggerty wrote:

I had a forced restart on my Debian 8.1 instance that I have on Virtualbox as a guest OS on Windows 10.

Jun 08 14:57:06 Sarnya neo4j[13667]: /usr/share/neo4j/bin/neo4j: line 149: /var/run/neo4j/neo4j.pid: No such file or directory

Hello John

I'm sorry that you've hit this problem. It's a known bug in the 3.0 Debian package which will be fixed in the next patch release (3.0.3, which should be out in the next few days).

In the meantime, the workaround is to create /var/run/neo4j and chown it to the neo4j user after every reboot.

-Ben