Alfresco does not shutdown properly

[simon]

Alfresco,

We stop / backup / start Alfresco on a daily base on 4 different servers running 2.1 Community, Enterprise 1.4.1 and Enterprise 1.4.3 all on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and "sometimes" Alfresco refuses to shutdown the way it should. We run Alfresco with Tomcat as available on the Alfresco website, no portal integration or other fancy stuff.

This problem is not new (had this with previous Alfresco versions as well) and it's not always consistant. When it happens Alfresco stops (web client not available anymore) and the shutdown output seems normal BUT the process is still running.

If this happens and I ran the 'alfresco.sh stop' command I tried to run the same command again which tells:

SEVERE: Catalina.stop:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused‍‍

It's the same error as if you would run the 'alfresco.sh stop' 2x without delay.

Has anyone seen this behavior or any idea when this could happen? First I thought it had something to do with the shutdown while Alfresco was syncing with LDAP but this doesn't seem the problem. Maybe when someone is uploading a document or keeping a CIFS connection open? I have no idea…

Any hints or hooks could help, thanks!

[simon]

Steve and Kevin,

Great, this could indeed be the problem. I'll try to kill OpenOffice and and shutdown Alfresco to see if this helps, if I find the time.

[tschiller]

Maybe a silly question… but how do I shut down OpenOffice? And a related silly question… am I supposed to be running OpenOffice (in the background?) before/after/while I am running the server? Hmm…

-Tamar

n.b. I do have OO installed on my system.

[simon]

Tamar,

The problem should be solved in the latest 2.1.1 release but I didn't test this yet. You can kill OpenOffice by killing the process (on Linux that is). First find the process and then kill that one:

ps -ef | grep openoffice
kill <pid>‍‍

As far as I know you are not supposed to run OpenOffice. You'll need OpenOffice for the PDF conversions but if you do not use this feature I suppose you could bypass this. Maybe you also need it for plain text conversions but I'm not sure if this is an optional feature or an Alfresco prerequisite.

[tschiller]

I am running WinXP, not Linux. (I do miss "kill". Sigh.) So would it be in Task Manager, or do I have to actually stop the service under Administrative Tools? Oh well, I guess it will be a moot point when the next release comes out! Thanks for your help!