Cannot Restart MongoDB 2.4.3 on Debian 6.0.7 (32-bit)

Question

I installed MongoDB on a Debian VM using apt-get from the 10gen repository. Some time after the install, I wanted to enable authentication in the configuration file, but when I ran service mongodb restart, it stopped and refused to start again.

I am able to reproduce this reliably: every time I run apt-get purge mongodb-10gen; apt-get install mongodb-10gen the server starts. However. when I run service mongodb start, it says

Starting database: mongodb failed!

There is nothing written to the mongo.log file, or any other log that I could find.

Answer 1

I edited /etc/init.d/mongodb to remove the --background argument from the call to start-stop-daemon and got an error with a stack trace. I can't post the full stack trace (because I can't scroll back in the terminal window to get it), but the last function call before the error was some function that has to do with getting the system language.

I had previously set LANG="en_US.UTF-8" in order to build some ruby gems. I ran unset LANG and now I am able to start MongoDB.

(The interesting thing is that I then set LANG... again and restarted MongoDB and it still worked.)

Answer 2

Did it look something like the stack trace here?

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-9273

This might be a case of the Locale settings getting messed up - I have seen a logout/login fix that, or a direct setting of LC_ALL or similar do the same. If you can figure out how to reproduce it reliably, then it would be worth reporting, I suspect this is actually a boost dependency rather than a MongoDB one but still worth knowing the trigger and fix for the problem.