[Zope] Unexplained restart on add

[Charlie Reiman]

With all due respect, these machines don't sound nearly identical at all.
Having said that, I can provide a little help.

The mysterious restarting is from the -Z option in the start script. Disable
the debugging option (-D) and enable the watchdog (-Z watchdog.pid) on your
development server. You will now have a watchdog zope monitoring and
restarting the actual working zope (when it dies, of course). Check the
source in z2.py for all the startup options.

My suspicion is that you need to look into permissions. Your product might
be doing something that it can't do when run as nobody.

If you are completely lost, set aside a huge hunk of disk space and try it
running under truss. That should tell you what system call, if any, croaked
your system. You will probably need to run under -D, no -Z, to keep zope
under one process. And, of course, you won't be able to use the startup
script. And, of couse, I'm assuming you have truss at your disposal.

Good luck. Hopefully someone else will have better advice.

Charlie Reiman

> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Terry
> Hancock
> Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 5:56 PM
> To: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] Unexplained restart on add
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> By design, I have my development server and production
> server running the same version of Python and Zope.
>
> However, when I tried to install my newly developed
> product on the production server, I ran into problems,
> despite the fact that I have practiced this several
> times now on the development server which you would
> think would be pretty much the same.
>
> The problem is that, although the product shows up
> in the product control panel okay, attempting to
> add the main object from the product into a folder
> causes the server to restart (some of the lesser
> objects defined by my product will add without
> problems).
>
> To make matters worse, it does this without any kind
> of explanation: no traceback, no log messages (other
> than the normal shutdown and restart messages -- which
> proves it *is* logging events).  The browser just
> reports a "refused" error message and visiting the
> control panel shows a short time since the last restart,
> indicating that it restarted. The events log shows
> the regular shutdown and restart events -- exactly
> as if I had clicked on the restart button in the
> control panel.  It's really pretty infuriating!
>
> Also, frankly I don't know how they get it to restart
> on failures, anyway. My development server doesn't
> do that -- I occasionally get hangs or crashes, but
> never restarts.  Obviously that would be a nice thing to
> be able to do in a production setting, but I don't
> understand how the magic works.
>
> There are, of course, lots of little differences:
> * I'm running Debian Linux and they are running FreeBSD
>   (I think), though both are Intel architecture and
>   the packages are installed from source. (I'm not
>   using the Debian Zope package, but one downloaded
>   from www.zope.org).
>
> * I run Zope as a special user, while they have it
>   starting as "root" (which means it should run as
>   "nobody" IIRC).
>
> * I use the default file-storage, whereas they run ZEO
>   to separate the storage process (I think it still uses
>   file-storage, but from ZEO).  They claim this is
>   faster even though the site isn't replicated.
>
> * There are some products in their Zope install that
>   aren't in mine -- a hot fix, and some other, apparently
>   unrelated things.
>
> So -- any ideas about what could cause this other
> Zope instance to restart silently without generating
> any error messages?   Bear in mind that it added without
> incident on another machine running the same version of
> Python and Zope -- it has to be something specific to
> this other Zope setup. A general problem with my product
> would be expected to fail on both machines.
>
> The only time I saw something at all similar to this
> was a crash (on my development server) which occured
> because a file referenced in a DTMLFile() method didn't
> exist. But that at least reported an IOError in the
> log file, which this isn't doing.
>
> I'm aware of course, that with such a new product,
> this is most likely something wrong in my product --
> just something that only shows up on certain configurations
> of Zope. What I'm looking for is some way to get more
> error reporting out of Zope so I can figure out what's
> causing the problem.
>
> Thanks,
> Terry
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Terry Hancock
> hancock@anansispaceworks.com
> Anansi Spaceworks
> http://www.anansispaceworks.com
> P.O. Box 60583
> Pasadena, CA 91116-6583
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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