I’m still tracing this through, but there’s an occasional issue I’m seeing on Windows 2008 servers when it comes to starting Drillbridge. If you get an error when you try and start the service, check your logs and try to find the cause, as you normally would. If you see an error along these lines:

INFO   | jvm 1    | 2015/04/07 10:09:39 | org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start embedded container; nested exception is org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedServletContainerException: Unable to create Tomcat tempdir

It could be a permissions problem such that the account running Drillbridge does not have high enough privileges to create a temporary folder for some web server files. If this is the case, you can actually specify the temporary folder yourself.

Open up /config/wrapper.conf and search for the text “additional”. You should find a commented our line like this:

#wrapper.java.additional.1=

You can leave that uncommented but just add in the following line:

wrapper.java.additional.1=-Djava.io.tmpdir=D:/Drillbridge/tmp

Then go make sure that you create the /tmp folder so that the folder path exists. You don’t have to use this folder name, drive, path, or anything. It just has to be a folder that exists and that the Drillbridge user has the ability to write to. Save the file and then start (or restart if Drillbridge was already running) Drillbridge. Everything should now start fine.

I’m still tracing down the root cause of this to try and make it so that users would never have to apply this fix themselves but until then, this fix works well enough. I haven’t seen this issue on Linux editions of Drillbridge – just Windows Server 2008 in environments that are relatively locked down.