topic Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start in Knowledge Management

After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

jcrabb_splunk — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 16:29:23 GMT

After upgrading to Splunk Enterprise 6.5.0, the KV Store will not start. On my indexers I see:

10/5/2016, 5:44:56 AM:

Search peer indexer01.domain.local has the following message: Failed to start KV Store process. See mongod.log and splunkd.log for details.

In splunkd.log I find:

10-05-2016 05:44:56.087 +0000 ERROR MongodRunner - mongod exited abnormally (exit code 14, status: exited with code 14) - look at mongod.log to investigate.

Looking in the mongod.log I find:

2016-10-05T05:44:56.753Z W CONTROL  No SSL certificate validation can be performed since no CA file has been provided; please specify an sslCAFile parameter
 2016-10-05T05:44:56.761Z F NETWORK  The provided SSL certificate is expired or not yet valid.
 2016-10-05T05:44:56.761Z I -        Fatal Assertion 28652
 2016-10-05T05:44:56.761Z I -
 ***aborting after fassert() failure

How can this be resolved?

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

jcrabb_splunk — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 16:35:13 GMT

This can happen if the cert used by Splunkd to talk to Mongod has expired. Verify your certs are valid. For example, to validate the expiration date for server.pem you can run:

From $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/auth/

openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in ./server.pem

Results:

notAfter=Dec  10 14:017:25 2015 GMT

In the example above, the cert is expired. If you want to create a new cert you can look at splunk createssl:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk help createssl

An example:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk createssl server-cert -d $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/auth -n server -c cn.domain.com -l 2048

Simply adjust for your environment requirements/settings. Once the new cert is in place, you can test to confirm it is valid:

From $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/auth/

openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in ./server.pem

Results:

notAfter=Aug 22 15:30:45 2019 GMT

If it is now valid, restart Splunk and validate if KVStore is running:

ps -ax | grep mongod

26108 ?        Ssl   62:11 mongod --dbpath=/opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/kvstore/mongo --port=8191 --timeStampFormat=iso8601-utc --smallfiles --oplogSize=200 --keyFile=/opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/kvstore/mongo/splunk.key --setParameter=enableLocalhostAuthBypass=0 --replSet=50D25A40-7DD2-4017-A223-732705AD4A96 --sslAllowInvalidHostnames --sslMode=preferSSL --sslPEMKeyFile=/opt/splunk/etc/auth/server.pem --sslPEMKeyPassword=xxxxxxxx --nounixsocket

And also:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk _internal call /services/server/info |grep -i kvstore

<s:key name="kvStoreStatus">ready</s:key>

A third way to check is to run the following search from command line on the instance where you have the "Deployment Management Console / Monitor Console" Configured.

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk search "| rest /services/server/info splunk_server=* | fields splunk_server, kvStoreStatus"

          splunk_server       kvStoreStatus
    ------------------------- -------------
    indexer01.domain.com      ready
    indexer02.domain.com      ready
    indexer03.domain.com      ready
    indexer04.domain.com      ready
    indexer05.domain.com      ready

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

GArienti — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 19:43:49 GMT

can we watch this and get alerted when it's expiring.
mine expired 2 years ago and until I upgraded to 6.5 it didn't come up...

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

david_casey — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 19:50:21 GMT

After upgrading to 6.5 I am getting:

1) "Failed to start KV Store process. See mongod.log and splunkd.log for details."
2) "KV Store changed status to failed. KVStore process terminated."
3) "KV Store process terminated abnormally (exit code 1, status exited with code 1)"

I see nothing in Answers related to this. Help!!

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

david_casey — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 14:51:31 GMT

This has been resolved. Somehow during the upgrade to 6.5 the permissions on splunk.key changed. The permissions on the splunk.key file had to be reset as read-only and the search head rebooted. Problem solved. Shout out to Mike Cormier @ Concanon for his assistance!

Update: Typo fixed - splunk.key is the correct file name.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

wcgage — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 02:54:01 GMT

I am on a MAC and I don't see the kvstore.key file. Where should it be?

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

david_casey — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 11:50:48 GMT

/opt/splunk/var/lib/kvstore/mongo/splunk.key

🙂

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

miteshp250283 — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 13:47:06 GMT

I am facing the same error on freshly installed Splunk 6.5.0 on Windows 10 x64. My install is a standalone trial for exploring new features and does not have commercial Enterprise license or domain environment.

Any idea if this error has major implication or safe to ignore in this case?

Appreciate the help.

Regards, Mitesh.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

ndoshi — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 19:46:36 GMT

To be precise, the file is /opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/kvstore/mongo/splunk.key. Doing a chmod 400 splunk.key did the trick.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

sylim_splunk — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 01:13:55 GMT

If you think it's not about the expired cert issue check the permissions of kvstore file as below - I had the same
- Copy from ndoshi's comments below to have better visibility.
To be precise, the file is /opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/kvstore/mongo/splunk.key. Doing a chmod 400 splunk.key did the trick.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

vinchakov_a — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 12:44:36 GMT

I have the same issue after update, but I get such errors in mongod.log:
2017-02-06T06:39:59.168Z E NETWORK [conn180] SSL: error:140760FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_CLIENT_HELLO:unknown protocol
2017-02-06T06:39:59.168Z I NETWORK [conn180] end connection 127.0.0.1:33592 (0 connections now open)
2017-02-06T06:39:59.175Z I NETWORK [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:33593 #181 (1 connection now open)
2017-02-06T06:39:59.175Z E NETWORK [conn181] SSL: error:140760FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_CLIENT_HELLO:unknown protocol
2017-02-06T06:39:59.175Z I NETWORK [conn181] end connection 127.0.0.1:33593 (0 connections now open)

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

fab73 — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 17:19:07 GMT

It worked for me, thanks

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

sgarvin55 — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:09:23 GMT

I wanted to add another gotcha I figured out after running through this answers post. It seems in prior versions to 6.5.2, specifically 6.5.0 and 6.5.1 as tested this worked, but now fails in 6.5.2. Customers had the following setting in their server.conf after upgrade:

[sslConfig]
sslVersions = "tls"

Customers whom upgraded to 6.5.2 found that KVSTORE wouldn't start, but splunkd.log didn't show any syntax issues. Only the mongod.log indicated something was wrong "unknown protocol".

splunkd.log
INFO loader - Server supporting SSL versions SSL3,TLS1.0,TLS1.1,TLS1.2

mongod.log
E NETWORK [conn893] SSL: error:140760FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_CLIENT_HELLO:unknown protocol
D NETWORK [conn893] SocketException: remote: 127.0.0.1:37578 error: 9001 socket exception [CONNECT_ERROR]

Removing the double quotes from "tls" fixed the the above issue. So the correct syntax is now:

[sslConfig]
sslVersions = tls

A bug has been created - SPL-138443

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

bport15 — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 20:28:03 GMT

What server.conf are you referring to? I'm not seeing this "sslVersion = "tls"" in the server.conf in /opt/splunk/etc/system/default or /opt/splunk/etc/system/local.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

a212830 — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 12:18:23 GMT

This is very helpful. I've never had to deal with setting any keys, so I have no idea what our cn.domain.com should be. I'm sure that it's probably right in front of me. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

a212830 — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 18:52:07 GMT

Never mind. Duh.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

damode — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 23:32:24 GMT

how to do this on Windows ?
I have Splunk on Windows and I checked the file permission, its already set to full control, still, I am getting the KVstore errors.
PLease help

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

claudio_manig — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 09:01:23 GMT

I had the same on a windows server with default certs- just stopped splunk, moved the default server.pem and start splunk. This forces cert gen of the default certs which solved the problem here.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

ryanhast — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 18:31:36 GMT

I ran into the issue with the KVstore not starting after upgrading my indexers form 6.4.7 to 6.6.4. Shout out to @sgarvin55 for his answer. In my server.conf on my indexers I had the following setting.
sslVersions = tls1.2, -ssl3, -ssl2, -ssl1

I removed that setting and restarted Splunk. KVstore started normally.
It appears the default is now tls1.2 for Splunk 6.6.3 and 6.6.4.

Re: After upgrading to 6.5.0, KV Store will not start

jmaple_splunk — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 15:48:27 GMT

Another option is to change the name of the current server.pem file in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/auth and restart Splunk. Splunk will generate a new certificate upon start-up.