Mongrel Won’t Load After Server Reset

After having to perform a hard reboot on a server, I was quite upset to see no mongrels running. The server had been very stable up this point, and mongrel_cluster was linked into /etc/rc*.d.

Turns out the version of mongrel_cluster was too old to deal with the stale PID files left behind after the hard reset.

sudo gem upgrade mongrel_cluster

Got the new init.d script from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel_cluster-1.0.5/resources/mongrel_cluster (to support a global PID_DIR)

Then add the –clean flag to the restart and start commands

  mongrel_cluster_ctl start --clean -c $CONF_DIR
  mongrel_cluster_ctl restart --clean -c $CONF_DIR

Finally, I wanted to check the status.

mongrel_cluster_ctl status

was giving the error “ERROR RUNNING ‘cluster::status’: Plugin /cluster::status does not exist in category /commands”

This happens when you have multiple older versions of mongrel_cluster.

sudo gem uninstall mongrel_cluster

After removing the ancient 0.2.1 it worked, so I just left 1.0.5.

Good help from paul goscicki and the mongrel mailing list.