Question

Problem is pretty self-explanatory – can’t get MongoDB to start, and nothing is logging anything anywhere so I can figure out what’s going on:

[10:10:23][root@my-server:~]$ start mongodb
mongodb stop/waiting
[10:10:28][root@my-server:~]$ ls /var/log/mongodb
[10:10:34][root@my-server:~]$ ls /var/lib/mongodb
[10:10:39][root@my-server:~]$ 

As you can see, mongodb immediately goes to stop/waiting, and doesn’t log anything to /var/log/mongodb. There’s nothing in /var/lib/mongodb either. There’s nothing useful in /var/log/upstart either. Where can I look for information on what the heck upstart is doing, and why it can’t seem to start MongoDB?

Answer 1

Answering my own question with another question: Mongo does not run when installed via mongodb-10gen package on Ubuntu 12.04. In this case, the mongodb-10gen package doesn’t seem to be installing the right executables for upstart to use, and upstart helpfully doesn’t log anything when the executable it expects to be present isn’t there. So I’ve asked a followup question about what the deal with the 10gen package is.