# Elastic Search is always status red when I restart with no data in index

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-search-is-always-status-red-when-i-restart-with-no-data-in-index/14991
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [December 22, 2013, 4:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-search-is-always-status-red-when-i-restart-with-no-data-in-index/14991 "2013-12-22T16:10:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 4

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### Author: ![jprante](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/jprante/32/44941_2.png) [@jprante](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/jprante)
#### Post date: [December 22, 2013, 6:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-search-is-always-status-red-when-i-restart-with-no-data-in-index/14991/4 "2013-12-22T18:49:10Z")

</div>

You have a single node, and number\_of\_replicas = 2. That will not work. It  
means, "create an index, but each shard should exist three times. And, If  
recovery is required, wait for a quorum of shards (3+1)/2 = 2 for recovery  
to begin, before setting the state to yellow".

Why is it wrong? Well, you have one node, and therefore, at maximum a  
quorum 1 of shards can be present. Creating replica on a single node is  
quite useless. Worse, increasing replica level from the default of 1 to 2  
tells a single node ES cluster not to recover at all, but instead wait for  
more nodes that can fulfill the quorum of shards.

Use

gateway.local.initial\_shards: 1

in the config to overwrite the default value of "quorum", and the gateway  
will recover the index.

Jörg

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