Knime-Server service dies soon after starting & unable to save license file

KNIME Server
1

Hello, I’m prefacing this with that I’m new to Knime Server.

The problem child is a physical server, running RHEL 7.7 running Kernel 3.10.0-1062.1.2.el7.x86_64. CPU is Intel® Xeon® Gold 5120 CPU @ 2.20GHz with 512GB of RAM with 32GB of swap. I also have plenty of space available to each mountpoint.

I’ve installed Knime Server on VMs recently with no issues at all; this was an install on a physical server following the same steps from the server documentation. However, whenever I restart the knime-server service, or run shutdown.sh/startup.sh in /$INSTALL_DIRECTORY/knime/apache-tomee-plus-7.0.5/bin/ as either root or knime user the service will not stay up for longer than a minute.

Also, whenever I try to upload the license file on Knime server I am greeted with a “Could not load uploaded license data from server: Error: Valid license directory was not detected” error. The license file is already in /$INSTALL_DIRECTORY/knime/workflow_repository/licenses/ with the same permissions as the other VMs.

I have blown away all contents of the /$INSTALL_DIRECTORY and reinstalled it about 5 times with no luck. One thing I am noticing is it’s somehow still keeping all of the users I’ve created before this started, so somewhere on the OS the user information is stored somewhere besides the /$INSTALL_DIRECTORY.

Has anyone seen this before?

Attached screenshot of license error:

knime_1
knime_11493×399 50.1 KB

2

Hi @chumley,
could you share the last few lines of the log file right after the server shut down? There might be some relevant information in there. If you like, I can also PM you so you can send it to me without sharing it in public.
Kind regards
Alexander

3

Hey Alex, I have a share session with some folks with Knime at noon ET today - I’ll keep you posted of the findings sir :slight_smile:

4

Perfect, I am sure they can help you with your issue! Anyways, good luck :smiley:

5

So this is for anyone that notices weird behavior. To make a long story short the java processes were acting really wonky. On top of that, they weren’t dying whenever we stopped/started the knime-server service. This is what we documented to do in case ‘abnormal’ behavior comes up.

1.  As root:  
1A.  systemctl stop knime-server #stops knime-server service
1B.  /$INSTALL_DIRECTORY/knime/apache-tomee-plus-7.0.5/bin/shutdown.sh #stops Apache
1C.  skill -9 `ps -ef |grep -i knime |grep -v grep |awk '{print $2}'` #kills every knime process
1D.  ps -ef |grep -i knime ##Make sure zero knime processes are running
1E.  systemctl start knime-server

2.  As knime user:
2A.  /$INSTALL_DIRECTORY/knime/apache-tomee-plus-7.0.5/bin/startup.sh
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