Haha, I do agree wit @Drainy, that's why I put in the disclaimer, however you never know... maybe that "one guy" left the office and subsequently left the services running as his name... any a SysAdmin will definantely be your best bet in troubleshooting permission/user related issues.... unless you are the SysAdmin
Uh... its probably the most descriptive error you could receive... did you check what user it was running as? did you speak to whoever started it? did you start it as another user? I would avoid everything after the second sentence on MHibbins answer, you just need to stop it with the correct user - anything else could, as he says, cause WORLD ENDING PROBLEMS. 🙂
Sounds to me like you do not have the correct account/permissions to control Splunk.
Are you making sure you are using thecorrect user? - perhaps it was started with "sudo" permissions (on nix systems)..
If you really can't stop Splunk naturally, you could always try to force the services to stop. Unix/Linux you can use the kill
command in conjunction with the relevant PID information, which can be obtained by using the following (FOR EXAMPLE):
ps -ef | grep -i splunk | grep -v grep
Or if you are using Windows you can find this by navigating to the "Windows Task Manager" and the "Processes" tab and find Splunkd and Splunkweb.
But this is obviously for last-resort situations... you should find out why your user can't control Splunk, for example speak to your SysAdmin.
NOTE: WHEN KILLING/STOPPING PROCESSES, ALL CARE MUST BE TAKEN AS THE WRONG PROCESS COULD HAVE SERIOUS IMPLICATIONS... if you are unsure contact your SysAdmin
Cheers.
@alacercogitatus, haha... very funny
http://youtu.be/Fow7iUaKrq4 😄 (portions NSFW)