Getting an error that a conflicting instance is currently active, when starting NetBackup dedupe services

Problem

Spoold and spad daemons fail to start, returning an error that a conflicting instance is currently active.

The error returns that the process id for an active instance is not found -
Error: 25001: spoold: a conflicting instance is currently active (pid = (not found))

bpps -x command output shows that no spoold or spad process is found running on the system.


 

Error Message

Getting the following errors when starting spoold:
# /usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/spoold -v
Info: set entire process max log size to 0
Info: set entire process max log size to 0
Info: Startup: occurred at Fri Sep 16 11:14:03 2016
Error: 25017: DaemonLockSimpleTestA: Unknown error
Error: 25001: spoold: a conflicting instance is currently active (pid = (not found))
Error: 26016: Symantec PureDisk Content Router: Bootstrap failure.

Cause

Under the /var/run directory, files with .pid extension are used to avoid multiple instances of the daemon process. The file size should normally not be empty and should contain the process id of the running process.

spoold.pid and spad.pid files were 0KB in size:
# cd /var/run
# ls -l sp*
-rw-r-----    1 root     system            0 Sep 14 16:55  spad.pid
-rw-r-----    1 root     system            0 Sep 14 16:55  spoold.pid

These files should not be empty. That is the reason the error did not specify the process id of the conflicting process - "pid = (not found)".

Solution

Remove or rename empty spoold.pid and spad.pid files -

# cd /var/run
# rm spoold.pid
# rm spad.pid

Then restart the daemons, these files will get recreated when the dedupe daemons start up.

Etrack : 3189735