Server fails to start

[brandondrew]

I installed MSM using all defaults except that I chose a system user. No matter what I did, the server would not start. msm main start appeared to work, but when I checked the status it was down (though active). ('main', of course, was the name of my server.)

(This could be related to another issue I'm about to report... but they may be separate so I'm reporting them separately.)

[brandondrew]

This is still happening after a manual install on a brand new virtual server.

[brandondrew]

This is on Ubuntu, by the way.

[brandondrew]

There's no indication that the server failed to start until you check status:

root@automine:~# msm server list
[ ACTIVE ] "main" is stopped. Server is down!
root@automine:~# msm main start

Maintaining world symbolic links... Done.
Synchronising flagged worlds on disk to RAM... Done.
Starting server... Done.
root@automine:~# msm main status
Server "main" is stopped.
root@automine:~#

[brandondrew]

The last failure, by the way, was following the defaults, therefore not a system user, just in case that was the problem.

This is all on a 1GB Digital Ocean virtual server ("droplet") in a New York region 3 data center. Before installing with

wget -q http://git.io/Sxpr9g -O /tmp/msm && bash /tmp/msm

I ran

apt-add-repository ppa:webupd8team/java -y
apt-get update -y
apt-get install oracle-java7-installer -y

When I did the manual install I copied a world into the world directory, but not when doing the automated install, since it was not mentioned in the directions for the automated install, and therefore I assume the script did it.

My server.properties contains

msm-version=minecraft/1.3.1

but nothing else. In all my installations, whether automated or not, there was nothing in the server.properties file until I added it. (In fact, as far as I remember, the file didn't exist the first time I did an installation.) This strikes me as very odd: I would expect a normal default server.properties file, as with a vanilla minecraft server. I don't know if this is a clue as to what is failing.

[brandondrew]

In case the problem was with Oracle's Java, I did this

apt-get install openjdk-7-jre
update-alternatives --config java

and switched to using OpenJDK7. No luck. Same problem.

[brandondrew]

Here's other info about the specifics of Ubuntu on my system:

root@automine:~# uname -a
Linux automine 3.13.0-57-generic #95-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jun 19 09:28:15 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[renderorange]

Sorry you're having issue. I did some testing with this, and just to confirm, when you ran your installation manually, you created the user with the following (username possibly varied):

useradd minecraft --home /opt/msm

and automated, when it asked about adding the user, did you say no to adding the new user as system account, or left that blank?

New server user to be created [minecraft]: 
Add new user as system account? [y/N]: 
Complete installation with these values? [y/N]: y

If that's the case, the user isn't being created as a system account, which is causing msm to have issue connecting to the screen session as the user.

Are you receiving the following when you try to start your world?

Starting server...You are not the owner of /var/run/screen/S-minecraft.

I suspect this has to do with the userid and groupid range the user is being created in, if not a system account. Guessing then there are permissions restrictions for the non-system account. I'm just guessing, though.

The quick work around, which I've verified, is to create the user as a system account, which allows access to the screen session and the server to start without issue.

useradd minecraft --system --home /opt/msm

If you're getting any other error, please reply with the exact message or other steps you're taking, if I missed something.

thanks.

[renderorange]

I created issue #306 for discussion of a possible fix for the --system account issue.

[brandondrew]

Initially I let the wizard create the user as a system account, since that
seemed most logical, despite not being the default. But since it failed, I
tried the manual approach (where I created the user--this was on a new
virtual server, IIRC) and later tried letting the wizard create the server
as a non-system account, since that was the default setting in the wizard.
(Perhaps unintentionally?)

On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 2:32 AM, Blaine Motsinger [email protected]
wrote:

I created issue #306 #306 for
discussion of a possible fix for the --system account issue.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#302 (comment).

Brandon Zylstra
[email protected]

[renderorange]

Sorry, but I'm unable to reproduce the issue you're having. I don't have access to a Digital Ocean VPS to be able to recreate your exact environment. Would you mind posting what's being logged in the latest.log file when you attempt to start the server?

[VelocityREST]

I know it's a relatively old issue, but I'm having the exact same problem here, though the difference is that I did a full automatic installation of msm.

I'm not sure of the OP has found a workaround to fix this, any help is highly appreciated.

[renderorange]

Hello. Could you please describe exactly what's happening when you start your minecraft server with msm? Is there anything being written to the log file when the server starts up?

For the sake of trying to get a better idea of what's going on, are you on a vps? Do you have a swap partition configured? Is there anything being written to /var/log/syslog when the server fails to start up?

[subdigital]

For those who stumble on this in the future...

I had this exact issue on a 1GB Digitalocean VPS. There was an error file in the server directory that mentioned Java had run out of memory. I edited /etc/msm.conf to use less RAM and the server started up just fine.

[dev-viinz]

how low did you set this then?

[subdigital]

I don’t remember