Monday 20 October 2014

MapGuide tidbits: MapGuide Server daemon doesn't start after reboot

This one will be short and sweet.

If you have rebooted your Linux server, and for some reason you can no longer start the MapGuide Server as a daemon. You should check that the /var/lock/mgserver directory exists and create it if it doesn't.

The mgserver process will try to create and lock a file in this directory and will bail out if it can't. This directory is cleared when the Linux server is restarted (at least in my observations). None of the wrapper scripts (mgserver.sh or mgserverd.sh) actually check if the directory exists, so they blindly proceed as though this directory existed.

We'll patch the mgserverd.sh script to create this directory if it doesn't exist before running the mgserver daemon. In the meantime, you can edit the mgserverd.sh file in the MapGuide Linux installation yourself to create the /var/lock/mgserver directory before running the mgserver process.