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Domino 8.5 Server not starting as a Service on Windows 2008 Server

I came in this morning to find that overnight, my newest server decided to restart itself. At 3:00AM. That was the first clue as to why. Turns out that Windows Update was never disabled. So, nicely, it decided to install its updates and reboot.

Funny thing is, after the reboot, Domino never started up. Rather, it started up, but then shutdown about 9 seconds later. Long enough to send me a Fault Recovery Notification, but not long enough to trigger NSD. So, I end up with an e-mail saying that the server was restarted after a fault, but not why. Very useful.

First thing, I uninstall the 4 updates from last night. (This has worked for me in the past.) One at a time, with a reboot after each one. Each time I get the same e-mail, but nothing further.

Next step, run Domino as a Windows application, to see if I can see anything on screen. Low and behold, I can. It starts perfectly.

Next, shut Domino down and restart the service. No dice. Same story as before.

Quick search of the IBM support site reveals nothing. (Nothing useful to this at least.)

I found this thread on the Domino 8.5 forum on Notes.net. The solution there lead to this technote.
The premise behind it is to statically tie the IP address of the server to the TCPIP port, and to do the same for the server controller. I edited my notes.ini directly as I didn't want anyone to remove it from the server configuration document by accident someday.

TCPIP_TcpIpAddress=0,8.55.128.173:1352
TCPIP_ControllerTcpIpAddress=8.55.128.173:2050

My server is back up and running and I've done a few reboots to make sure it stays that way.

Another lesson learned.

Comments

  1. Anonymous19 April 2010 at 21:44

    Thanks for the useful info. It helped me troubleshoot a Domino 8.5.1 server running on Windows 2008 that would not start up.

    -Eddie, Miami

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris Whisonant14 July 2010 at 06:14

    Good stuff John! Was having a very similar issue on a new Win2k8 server with Domino 8.5.1 FP3 not starting as service. After seeing your comment here about setting the TCPIP* lines in notes.ini, it got me to thinking about whether this new server of mine actually knew how to talk to itself. I couldn't ping the hostname as listed in server doc, so after clearing that up the server started fine as a service. So this could be something else for readers to be aware of as a possibility.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3 September 2010 at 07:27

    Great post. After moving the server to a new location (and IP), I was having the exact same issue. Thanks to your post, you saved me from re-inventing the wheel.

    Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous14 December 2010 at 23:51

    THANK YOU very much! This is a very useful hint - I was never able to solve this problem.

    Good job!!!

    Adam

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous17 April 2011 at 12:35

    Thank you...this information helped me to end 2 day outage.

    Thanks for sharing.
    Manjeet

    ReplyDelete
  6. Chris Whisonant30 May 2011 at 08:24

    Good stuff John! Was having a very similar issue on a new Win2k8 server with Domino 8.5.1 FP3 not starting as service. After seeing your comment here about setting the TCPIP* lines in notes.ini, it got me to thinking about whether this new server of mine actually knew how to talk to itself. I couldn't ping the hostname as listed in server doc, so after clearing that up the server started fine as a service. So this could be something else for readers to be aware of as a possibility.

    ReplyDelete

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