Troubleshooting

This new (as of v.4.6) section of the Admin guide is for tips on how to diagnose and fix system problems.

Glassfish

server.log is the main place to look when you encounter problems. Hopefully an error message has been logged. If there’s a stack trace, it may be of interest to developers, especially they can trace line numbers back to a tagged version.

For debugging purposes, you may find it helpful to increase logging levels as mentioned in the Debugging section of the Developer Guide.

Our guides focus on using the command line to manage Glassfish but you might be interested in an admin GUI at http://localhost:4848

Deployment fails, “EJB Timer Service not available”

Sometimes the Dataverse application fails to deploy, or Glassfish fails to restart once the application is deployed, with the following error message: “remote failure: Error occurred during deployment: Exception while loading the app : EJB Timer Service is not available. Please see server.log for more details.”

We don’t know what’s causing this issue, but here’s a known workaround:

  • Stop Glassfish;
  • Remove the generated and osgi-cache directories;
  • Delete all the rows from the EJB__TIMER__TBL table in the database;
  • Start Glassfish

The shell script below performs the steps above. Note that it may or may not work on your system, so it is provided as an example only, downloadable here. Aside from the configuration values that need to be changed to reflect your environment (the Glassfish directory, name of the database, etc.) the script relies on the database being configured in a certain way for access. (See the comments in the script for more information)

#!/bin/sh

# EBJ timers sometimes cause problems; utility to clear generated directories and database rows

# assumes this script is being run as root, and that the postgres user had passwordless 
# access to the database (local sockets, or appropriate environmental variables).

# will restart glassfish if it's stopped; comment out the `start-domain` command at the end
# if you'd like to avoid that.

# directory where glassfish is installed
GLASSFISH_DIR=/usr/local/glassfish4

# directory within glassfish (defaults)
DV_DIR=${GLASSFISH_DIR}/glassfish/domains/domain1

# name of dataverse database
DV_DB=dvndb

# OS user for the database
DB_USER=postgres

# stop the glassfish domain (generates a warning if glassfish is stopped)
${GLASSFISH_DIR}/bin/asadmin stop-domain

rm -rf ${GLASSFISH_DIR}/${DV_DIR}/generated/
rm -rf ${GLASSFISH_DIR}/${DV_DIR}/osgi-cache/felix

sudo -u ${DB_USER} psql ${DV_DB} -c 'delete from "EJB__TIMER__TBL"';

# restart the domain (also generates a warning if glassfish is stopped)
${GLASSFISH_DIR}/bin/asadmin start-domain