My AOLServer has fallen and can't get up

If you had a working server and it is failing to start or serve pages here are some steps to take to find out where things might have gone horribly wrong.

There are some quick things to check first.

• Make sure the server can write it's log files and that the device is not full.
• Check that the server root is correctly set and that the web server user can read the files.
• Make sure the environment variables needed for DB access are set properly.
• Check that you can log on to the database with the username and password in the config file (with psql as the correct user on postgres or with sqlplus on oracle).
• Make sure that the port you are trying to use is not already in use (you can use netstat -an to see which ports are being used and on linux lsof will tell you which program has which file open which will tell you which program is listening on a port you want to use.

If none of those things resolve the problem then you should attack it more systematically:

1. Try moving the yourserver-error.log (or removing it if you don't care about saving it) and then restarting the server. Then look through the new log and try egrep -i error\|warning yourserver-error.log to see if there is anything obvious there.
2. If it is running from inittab or deamontools, turn it off so that you can start the server in the foreground by hand. Do this in your /etc/inittab file by changing respawn to off for your server and then issue the command "init q" to tell init to reread the inittab file. With daemontools go to the service directory (typically in /service) and issuing the command "svc -d yourserver".

3. If you are running the server on port 80 (or other low port) change the config file to use a high port (8080 or 8000 are typically used but any unused port above 1024 should be fine).

   After setting it to a high port, run the server in the foreground as the user it typically runs as (nsadmin). and watch the server log.