passenger_instance_registry_dir not found

[Manjurul Islam]

I have been assigned a job to manage a server, it has Phusion Passenger install with NGINX and Ruby. Other features installed are Postgres, Redis and MongoDB.

The problem I am facing is, I cannot view "passenger-status", it is giving error like below:

ERROR: Phusion Passenger doesn't seem to be running. If you are sure that it is running, then the causes of this problem could be:

1. You customized the instance registry directory using Apache's PassengerInstanceRegistryDir option, Nginx's passenger_instance_registry_dir option, or Phusion Passenger Standalone's --instance-registry-dir command line argument. If so, please set the environment variable PASSENGER_INSTANCE_REGISTRY_DIR to that directory and run passenger-status again.
2. The instance directory has been removed by an operating system background service. Please set a different instance registry directory using Apache's PassengerInstanceRegistryDir option, Nginx's passenger_instance_registry_dir option, or Phusion Passenger Standalone's --instance-registry-dir command line argument.

But "passenger-config validate install" gives

 passenger-config validate-install
What would you like to validate?
Use <space> to select.
If the menu doesn't display correctly, press '!'

 ‣ ⬢  Passenger itself
   ⬡  Apache

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 * Checking whether this Passenger install is in PATH... ✓
 * Checking whether there are no other Passenger installations... ✓

Everything looks good. :-)

 even I cannot find a place where this string is available "PASSENGER_INSTANCE_REGISTRY_DIR", tried "grep -r PASSENGER_INSTANCE_REGISTRY_DIR / 2> /dev/null" which returned only this result below:

Binary file /run/log/journal/2d406ad2c45e4e1b86f11fa56e394d32/system.journal matches

Another big problem is passenger-memory-stats gives ? at private memory.

There is only one version of passenger is installed, so no question on version mismatched. it is version 5.0.15.

there is random directory here /tmp/passenger.(random string) which is an example of an instance directory. This changes indeed with every startup (because it is specific to an instance).

I need to fix it, any help?

[Daniel Knoppel]

If possible you should definitely upgrade to passenger 5.0.21. It also has some improvements in install validation.

Since you have Passenger + Apache, according to the error message you should check your apache config file if there is a special setting for the "PassengerInstanceRegistryDir" option. If that's not there, or already set to /tmp then perhaps the permission on the files is such that the user you are running passenger-status from can't read them?

Did you try passenger-memory-stats with sudo?

- Daniel

[Manjurul Islam]

Yes, I have tried using sudo too, private memory still showing "?" mark. And my stack is not Apache, it is using NGINX.

I tried using su, it gives the below result:

su passenger-memory-stats
su: user passenger-memory-stats does not exist

Is there anyway to fix this without updating the passenger? And if I update passenger, will it retain my existing configuration and everything, including my application, mail Rails and NGINX configuration?

-Regards
-Abdullah

[Hongli Lai]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:55 PM, Manjurul Islam
<digitalr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I have tried using sudo too, private memory still showing "?" mark. And
> my stack is not Apache, it is using NGINX.

What Linux distribution and version are you using? Maybe something on
your system is preventing passenger-memory-stats from measuring
private memory.

> I tried using su, it gives the below result:
>
>> su passenger-memory-stats
>> su: user passenger-memory-stats does not exist

When using su (not sudo), you are supposed to pass the command via -c,
like this: su -c passenger-memory-stats

> Is there anyway to fix this without updating the passenger? And if I update
> passenger, will it retain my existing configuration and everything,
> including my application, mail Rails and NGINX configuration?

We don't yet know what's causing your problem, but it's possible that
this is just a bug that has already been fixed in the latest version.
Don't worry: if you update Passenger, you will retain everything
including your configuration, application, etc.

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[Manjurul Islam]

I am using the below:

CentOS Linux release 7.1.1503 (Core)
kernel: 3.14.32-xxxx-grs-ipv6-64

and did su -c, here is the output

su -c passenger-memory-stats
Version: 5.0.15
Date   : 2015-11-20 15:43:37 -0500
------------- Apache processes -------------
*** WARNING: The Apache executable cannot be found.
Please set the APXS2 environment variable to your 'apxs2' executable's filename, or set the HTTPD environment variable to your 'httpd' or 'apache2' executable's filename.


--------- Nginx processes ---------
PID   PPID  VMSize   Private  Name
-----------------------------------
9671  1     58.0 MB  ?        nginx: master process /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -c /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
9673  9671  60.2 MB  ?        nginx: worker process
9674  9671  60.1 MB  ?        nginx: worker process
### Processes: 3
### Total private dirty RSS: 0.00 MB (?)


----- Passenger processes ------
PID    VMSize     Private  Name
--------------------------------
9626   420.2 MB   ?        Passenger watchdog
9629   3685.7 MB  ?        Passenger core
9638   291.8 MB   ?        Passenger ust-router
9809   457.4 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/www/abcdef/public
9874   446.6 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/advic.net/public (production)
9938   670.1 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/gtt/public (production)
11399  442.4 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/advice.net/public (production)
11447  457.3 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/www/abcdef/public
11721  582.4 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/gtt/public (production)
11769  582.4 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/gtt/public (production)
11778  582.5 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/gtt/public (production)
22771  439.7 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/advice.com/public (production)
23568  437.2 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/advice.com/public (production)
24499  433.7 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/advice.com/public (production)
25343  301.8 MB   ?        Passenger AppPreloader: /opt/web/advice.com
25370  433.7 MB   ?        Passenger RubyApp: /opt/web/advice.com/public (production)
### Processes: 16
### Total private dirty RSS: 0.00 MB (?)

All the server usually get Passenger, ruby, nginx deployed exactly in same manner, but only this server is having problem. Though other server has CentOS 6.7 (old one)

regards

[Hongli Lai]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 9:48 PM, Manjurul Islam
<digitalr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am using the below:
>
> CentOS Linux release 7.1.1503 (Core)
> kernel: 3.14.32-xxxx-grs-ipv6-64

Does the 'grs' indicate that your kernel is using grsec? If so then
you probably have some kind of security feature enabled that prevents
measuring private memory. Unfortunately I am not a grsec expert so I
cannot help you with that.

[Abdullah]

Hi,

If I upgrade, you said it will retain all my config and settings, but do I need to manually edit nginx.conf to point the passenger_root to new version directory? Or everything will be fully automated? 

Regards

--

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With Best Regards

Abdullah Mohammad Manjurul Islam
Cell: +880 1730 982562
Email: digitalr...@gmail.com ; islamm...@yahoo.com
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[Hongli Lai]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 10:46 PM, Abdullah <digitalr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If I upgrade, you said it will retain all my config and settings, but do I
> need to manually edit nginx.conf to point the passenger_root to new version
> directory? Or everything will be fully automated?

If you use Phusion's Debian or RPM packages, then you do not need to
edit nginx.conf to change passenger_root. Otherwise (e.g. if you
installed from source, or Homebrew, or RubyGems) then you do.

[Abdullah]

I have this kind of directory

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/passenger-5.0.15

so it means it is from RubyGems.