3.3. Broker Application Response Failure

The broker host service is a Rails application that runs inside the Passenger service. There can be cases when the broker host service appears to be running, but in reality is not. If the Passenger service fails to start for some reason, the broker host service will not start, even if the httpd service is running. So even though the service openshift-broker start command reports success, the service may not actually be running.

Failures and problems with the Passenger service are logged in the /var/www/openshift/broker/httpd/logs/error_log file on the broker host, as shown in the following screen output:

[Wed Oct 17 23:48:04 2012] [error] *** Passenger could not be initialized because of this error: Unable to start the Phusion Passenger watchdog (/usr/lib64/gems/exts/passenger-3.0.17/agents/PassengerWatchdog): Permission denied (13)

This shows that the Passenger service has failed to start. This can be caused by dependency issues with the RubyGems package, which often occurs when Bundler attempts to regenerate the /var/www/openshift/broker/Gemfile.lock file.

Run the following commands to verify whether this problem exists:

# cd /var/www/openshift/broker/
# bundle --local
 Could not find rack-1.3.0 in any of the sources

This shows that the specified dependency was not found. Updating all Ruby gems, and restarting the openshift-broker service could resolve this issue.

# oo-admin-chk
 Could not find rack-1.3.0 in any of the sources
 Run `bundle install` to install missing gems.