"Error creating core. No system property or default value specified for X"

[Teresa McMains <te...@t14-consulting.com>]

Some events as background.

I have made some changes to schema.xml to define a new field type and have a few string fields use this field type.
[cid:image001.png@01D61A1C.F1D06060]
I reloaded the core.

Upon suggestion from this group, rather than just re-indexing (because it might not refresh all segments appropriately), I deleted the "data" directory for the core and then re-indexed.
The new data directory contained an "index" directory with a single file called write.lock and nothing else. There was no tlog directory (which seems notable because we used to have one).

But things were behaving OK - that is searches worked and returned documents -- so I didn't think much of it.

This was Wednesday.

Today, we received errors that the core didn't exist.  When I connected to the admin interface, I had the error "Error creating core. No system property or default value specified for jdbcdir".

Now, our solconfig.xml does refer to "${jdbcdir}" and core.properties defines this setting as a path and that path exists.  These config files all exist and haven't been touched in several months. The permissions have not been changed.
I replaced "${jdbcdir}" with its value from core.properties. Received the same error about two other settings which I also replaced with hard-coded values which are defined in core.properties and I am now able to load the core.

My question is - what on earth just happened?

Once the core was reloaded, I re-indexed our data which completed in seconds (usually about 45 minutes) and searches returned no matches (0 documents).

Then, I replaced the basically empty data directory with a backup I made of the contents as of Wednesday and re-indexed and searches are working again (they return documents).  After doing this, I tried to put back the original solrconfig.xml but it still errored out with the same errors about missing default or system properties.

Screenshot of a section of the original solrconfig.xml:

[cid:image005.png@01D61A1F.468380E0]

Screenshot of the core.properties:

[cid:image006.png@01D61A1F.468380E0]

Any idea what happened and how I can go back to using my original solrconfig.xml which does not have hard-coded paths and parameters??
Also any thoughts on what went wrong with the re-index and why it never created any segment files in the index directory?
Are these two things related?

Many thanks,
Teresa

Re: "Error creating core. No system property or default value specified for X"

[Erick Erickson <er...@gmail.com>]

Screenshots do not come through, the mail server pretty aggressively strips them.

Ok, this is weird. There’s no way you should be getting results from an index that
has only a write.lock file. So the fact that you were suggests that you are looking.
at one thing and Solr is looking at another. How, is a puzzle. One hand-wavy
possibility is that you didn't restart the Solr server (or reload the core) after
deleting the data dir and the index files were still being held by open index
searchers, assuming a *nix system and assuming no new searchers were
opened.

As for the jdbc issue, I’m pretty sure how core.properties is irrelevant. These
definitions are usually either sysvars at runtime (i.e. -Dsomething=whatever)
or defined in the solr.in.sh file (again *nix).

I suspect that you are looking at one place and Solr is looking at another,
 i.e. SOLR_HOME, dataDir or other path is defined differently from
where you’re looking.

As to why things ran between Wednesday and now, the only thing I can come up
with is that no indexing was going on and/or the system restarted. Either one should
have surfaced the problem earlier.

> On Apr 24, 2020, at 10:01 AM, Teresa McMains <te...@t14-consulting.com> wrote:
> 
> Some events as background.
>  
> I have made some changes to schema.xml to define a new field type and have a few string fields use this field type.
> 
> I reloaded the core.
>  
> Upon suggestion from this group, rather than just re-indexing (because it might not refresh all segments appropriately), I deleted the “data” directory for the core and then re-indexed.
> The new data directory contained an “index” directory with a single file called write.lock and nothing else. There was no tlog directory (which seems notable because we used to have one).
>  
> But things were behaving OK – that is searches worked and returned documents -- so I didn’t think much of it.
>  
> This was Wednesday.
>  
> Today, we received errors that the core didn’t exist.  When I connected to the admin interface, I had the error “Error creating core. No system property or default value specified for jdbcdir”.
>  
> Now, our solconfig.xml does refer to “${jdbcdir}” and core.properties defines this setting as a path and that path exists.  These config files all exist and haven’t been touched in several months. The permissions have not been changed.
> I replaced “${jdbcdir}” with its value from core.properties. Received the same error about two other settings which I also replaced with hard-coded values which are defined in core.properties and I am now able to load the core.
>  
> My question is – what on earth just happened?
>  
> Once the core was reloaded, I re-indexed our data which completed in seconds (usually about 45 minutes) and searches returned no matches (0 documents).
>  
> Then, I replaced the basically empty data directory with a backup I made of the contents as of Wednesday and re-indexed and searches are working again (they return documents).  After doing this, I tried to put back the original solrconfig.xml but it still errored out with the same errors about missing default or system properties.
>  
> Screenshot of a section of the original solrconfig.xml:
>  
> 
>  
> Screenshot of the core.properties:
>  
> 
>  
> Any idea what happened and how I can go back to using my original solrconfig.xml which does not have hard-coded paths and parameters??
> Also any thoughts on what went wrong with the re-index and why it never created any segment files in the index directory?
> Are these two things related?
>  
> Many thanks,
> Teresa