Installing Kibana from apt and fails to start

[sbu (Steve Button)]

Hi,

We're installing and starting Kibana, using the instructions here :-

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/deb.html#deb-repo

However, it refuses to start as the kibana user. I would have expected this just to work.

It's using the systemd startup method, but will not start. I can't see why but I think it's a permissions problem with the kibana user. If I start as root, it runs fine. The kibana user doesn't have a shell even.

Interstingly in the syslog, it just start and stops continuously.

Mar 16 09:44:06 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Stopped Kibana.
Mar 16 09:44:06 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Started Kibana.
Mar 16 09:44:09 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Mar 16 09:44:09 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Unit entered failed state.
Mar 16 09:44:09 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mar 16 09:44:09 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
Mar 16 09:44:09 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Stopped Kibana.
Mar 16 09:44:09 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Started Kibana.
Mar 16 09:44:11 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Mar 16 09:44:11 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Unit entered failed state.
Mar 16 09:44:11 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mar 16 09:44:11 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
Mar 16 09:44:11 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Stopped Kibana.
Mar 16 09:44:11 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Started Kibana.
Mar 16 09:44:14 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Mar 16 09:44:14 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Unit entered failed state.
Mar 16 09:44:14 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mar 16 09:44:14 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: kibana.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
Mar 16 09:44:14 ukselastic0 systemd[1]: Stopped Kibana.

I notice the kibana user doesn't have a shell or a home directory, but even setting these up and trying to start kibana on the command line, just fails silently with a RC=1.

This is the LAST THING I need to get a fully automated Terraform build of Elastic, it's been quite a long slog.

Thanks for your help.

[lukas (Lukas Olson)]

Are you able to start the process successfully when SSH'd in using the kibana user or do you get the same error?

[sbu (Steve Button)]

Nope. I've added a shell to the kibana user so that I can switch to that user, and then ran kibana by hand using /usr/share/kibana/bin/kibana and it just drops back to the console with no error message. I get a return code of 1, but I can't see anything in any logs to indicate what's gone wrong.

[lukas (Lukas Olson)]

@jbudz @tylersmalley Any ideas?