Yesterday I ranted about the adamant db2 uncatalog. Today my ranting continues with 'ibmdirctl' - a command used to stop/start IBM Tivoli Directory Server. This is more of a gotcha than a rant though. I was testing my server script to automatically shutdown the directory server when the machine shuts down and bring the directory server back up when the machine is booted.

The commands to stop and start the directory server are
Start: ibmslapd OR ibmdirctl -h <hostname> -D <admin_DN> -w <password> -p <port> start -- -a
Stop: ibmdirctl -h <hostname> -D <admin_DN> -w <password> -p <port> stop

When I ran the script, I got, "data manager is already active, try using db2start from command line. Server is running in configuration only mode." Is this an error? Did the directory server start properly? Who knows? I checked the log files to find out the following information: "System error occurred while executing the command. Not an owner." Great! <sarcasm>A highly descriptive error message!</sarcasm>

After going through a lot of debugging, change of directory ownership and considering reinstalling the product we realized the ldap database owner's password had expired. I would have hoped for an "invalid credentials" error message somewhere. But an unhelpful error message is all we got. The lesson learned? Make sure system users' passwords never expire and if you want to debug, think outside the logs!