CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mongodb
modulitos
modulitos

Reputation: 15804

Starting mongod fails unless run as root

I am able to start my mongo server with the following command:

[lucas@ecoinstance]~/node/nodetest2$ sudo mongod --dbpath /home/lucas/node/nodetest2/data
 --fork --logpath /var/log/mongodb/mongod-nodetest2.log                                  
about to fork child process, waiting until server is ready for connections.
forked process: 10293
child process started successfully, parent exiting

but when I try to remove the sudo, I get the following error:

[lucas@ecoinstance]~/node/nodetest2$ mongod --dbpath /home/lucas/node/nodetest2/
data --fork --logpath /var/log/mongodb/mongod-nodetest2.log
about to fork child process, waiting until server is ready for connections.
forked process: 10284
ERROR: child process failed, exited with error number 1

Here is additional information:

[lucas@ecoinstance]~/node/nodetest2$ ls -l data/*
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 67108864 Jun  7 20:57 data/local.0
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 16777216 Jun  7 20:57 data/local.ns
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mongodb mongodb        6 Jun  7 20:57 data/mongod.lock
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 67108864 Jun  7 02:08 data/nodetest1.0
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 16777216 Jun  7 02:08 data/nodetest1.ns
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 67108864 Jun  7 23:01 data/nodetest2.0
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 16777216 Jun  7 23:01 data/nodetest2.ns

data/journal:
total 3145744
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 1073741824 Jun  7 23:01 j._0
-rw------- 1 root    root            88 Jun  7 23:01 lsn
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 1073741824 Jun  6 03:10 prealloc.1
-rw------- 1 mongodb mongodb 1073741824 Jun  6 03:12 prealloc.2

[lucas@ecoinstance]~/node/nodetest2$ ls -l /etc/mongod.conf 
-rw-r--r-- 1 mongodb mongodb 1701 May  5 15:07 /etc/mongod.conf

[lucas@ecoinstance]~/node/nodetest2$ ls -l /var/log/mongodb/
total 120
-rw-r--r-- 1 mongodb mongodb 96801 Jun  7 05:48 mongod.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root    root    15625 Jun  8 00:18 mongod-nodetest2.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 mongodb mongodb  2805 Jun  7 20:38 mongod-nodetest2.log.2014-06-07T20-57-47

I cannot find a similar problem. What is the cause of this issue?

Update Thanks to Asya's answer below, I ran a similar command, but changed the location of the log file to one which does not need root access privileges:

mongod --dbpath /home/lucas/node/nodetest2/data --fork --logpath /home/lucas/data/log/mongodb/mongod-nodetest2.log

I also encountered an issue where mongod was running in the background, similar to this question. Stopping that process before running the above command worked for me.

Thanks Asya!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 10074

Answers (1)

Asya Kamsky
Asya Kamsky

Reputation: 42352

If you start mongod as user xxx then all the directories and files it needs to use must be owned by user xxx - in your case I see several files owned by root so mongod cannot manipulate those files.

Fix the permissions and make sure you never run mongod as root again. Also, when you get an error from mongod looking in the log file will tell you exactly what caused an error. (In all cases except where the file is not writable by the user mongod is running as).

Upvotes: 6

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