I recently ran into a puzzling problem with a Cognos Unix installation. Even though the Cognos portal was running and fully functional, Cognos Configuration reported that the service was not running. As such, it could not be stopped through Cognos Configuration. Likewise, the command line cogconfig.sh -stop also had no effect. It was a runaway process with no control available through normal Cognos channels. If we shut down the Cognos process manually, then Cognos Configuration would not start up properly. At the very end of the process, it would report a failure – even though the Cognos portal was up and fully functional again.
After digging through the logs, I discovered that the key to this problem was the Cognos Bootstrap Service (CBS). The Cognos Bootstrap Service makes sure that the main Java process is running by monitoring the shutdown port.
The log file cbs_run.log reported:
CBSBootstrapService Process ID could not be written to file. The cogbootstrapservice -stop command will not work. Use ‘kill -9′ instead.
The log file cbs_isrunning.log reported:
CBSBootstrapService Process is not running.
So if the Cognos Bootstrap Service doesn’t run at all, then Cognos Configuration will not know if Cognos is running or not.
The file that was preventing our Cognos Bootstrap Service from starting was cogbootstrap_service.pid which resides in the c10\logs directory. Our Unix account did not have rights to write to this file, which was the cause of the problem.
Once the Cognos Bootstrap Service was able to run again, our Cognos startup/shutdown issue was resolved.
