My Domino service is permanently starting....

Ian Raffle  31 August 2011 10:55:27

Like all good Domino and Domain admins you reboot your servers periodically. You don't? Well you probably should, but that's another story. (Note to self, to write a short paragraph on why it's a good thing to reboot servers periodically).

So, back to the subject. You've rebooted your server (in this case a Windows server), and you check your services to make sure that everything is back up and running. Hmmmm, Lotus Domino Server says "Starting". Ok, I'll check that again in about 5 mins. 5 Minutes later and it's still starting, and nobody can access it through Lotus Notes. Windows won't let you stop it, or restart it, disabling it does nothing, so what next?

If you load up Task Manager, select the Processes tab, you'll see nservice.exe is active. End that process (acknowledging the warning), refresh the services display and you should see that the word 'Starting' has gone. You can then successfully start your Domino service again.

The final step, is to try to find out why it wouldn't start properly in the first place. For the second time in this blog entry I'm going to use the words "but that's another story".