After server migration and product upgrade I am unable to start Crowd as a service
Asked by Bill:

I recently migrated several Atlassian products from an older (Win Server 2008R2) to a newer (Win Server 2016) server, including Bitbucket Server, Confluence, and Crowd. These applications all appear to work without error, but when trying to start Crowd as a service Crowd does not start properly. I am able to start Crowd just fine when I manually run the start_crowd.bat file in the install directory. I have looked through the logs and nothing seems to point me to what could be causing this issue.


Answers:
author: Bruno Vincent
body: Hi [@Bill](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/233194)

My guess is that you might not have set the JAVA_HOME environment variable system wide. This would explain why you can run Crowd with your user but not as a service. Please go to the *apache-tomcat/bin* directory of your Crowd instance and run *tomcat8w.exe* . Then click on the *Java* tab and check that the *Java Virtual Machine* field is pointing to the right JDK (JDK is mandatory, not just JRE).

comments: author: Bill
body: No, I have that set properly:

echo %JAVA_HOME%  
C:\\Java\\jdk1.8

When I try running tomcat8w.exe I get a message "The specified service does not exist as an installed service. Unable to open 'tomcat8' "

Following this guide to create the service:

[https://confluence.atlassian.com/crowd/installing-crowd-as-a-windows-service-82870454.html](https://confluence.atlassian.com/crowd/installing-crowd-as-a-windows-service-82870454.html "Installing Crowd as a Windows Service - Atlassian Documentation")

I looked at the batch file (apache-tomcat/bin/service.bat) and it appears to create the service using tomcat8.exe, not tomcat8w.exe. When I attempt to run tomcat8.exe I get a window that opens and closes basically instantly.

Do I need to modify a batch file to point to tomcat8w instead of tomcat8?

Thanks For all your help so far!


author: Bruno Vincent
body: Hi [@Bill](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/233194)

In a command prompt, please go to apache-tomcat/bin and then run

```
tomcat8w.exe //MS//Crowd
```

(I assume you actually installed the Crowd service with *service.bat install Crowd*)

Hopefully you should now see the Tomcat8 GUI


author: Bill
body: Thank you for your help, but I just solved my own issue. Long story short I need to stop breezing through documentation.

I skipped the step of renaming/using the 64 bit .exe and .dll mentioned in the Crowd installation guide (in the big yellow box, with an orange ! in front of it). Once I performed this everything worked properly starting Crowd as a service.

The yellow box is also at the top of the "Setting up Crowd as a service" page:

If you are trying to set up Crowd as a Windows Service on a 64 bit machine, you should ensure that Crowd uses 64-bit Tomcat binaries. See the Crowd installation guide for more details.

I only hope my error helps someone else in the future.

Thanks again!


author: Bruno Vincent
body: Thanks for keeping us updated. The 64 bit renaming was actually my next step to check ;-)


author: Marcin Kempa
body: Hi [@Bill](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/233194),

Is there anything in the log files that might indicate the root cause? Does the user that runs Crowd service has access to all the installation and home directory files? Is it the same user account as the one when you start Crowd using the start_crowd.bat?

Best Regards,

Marcin Kempa

comments: author: Bill
body: I haven't seen anything in the log files that seems to indicate an issue with starting the web app. I think I've ruled out permissions, as I took the drastic step of opening up the two pertinent directories (D:\\Atlassian and D:\\Data) to allow "Full Control" to "Everyone". I simply get a Windows Services message stating "Windows could not start the Apache Tomcat 8.5 Crowd on Local Computer. For more information, review System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code 1."

The System Event log basically says "Error code 1".


Tags: migration

service

update