Restarting Graylog Appliance breaks everything

[no-good-username]

1. Describe your incident:
Restarting Graylog from the prebuilt appliance obliterates everything

2. Describe your environment:

• OS Information: Graylog Appliance - updated to latest

• Package Version: 4.2.5

• Service logs, configurations, and environment variables:
  Nothing exotic, just attempting a server/service restart

3. What steps have you already taken to try and solve the problem?
Asking the community because the failure makes no sense

4. How can the community help?
Insight on how restarting Graylog breaks everything

Resulting Web message:

Graylog is currently not reachable…

There is either no Graylog web application running or it’s not reachable by your browser. Please reload this page in case the application needs some more time to start up. If your appliance is only reachable by a virtual IP or it’s behind a proxy, check the http_*_uri settings in the Graylog server.conf file. For further
reading check the online documentation:

Logfile:
2022-02-01T15:55:51.045Z INFO [ImmutableFeatureFlagsCollector] Following feature flags are used: {}
2022-02-01T15:55:51.199Z ERROR [CmdLineTool] Invalid configuration
com.github.joschi.jadconfig.ValidationException: Parameter password_secret should not be blank
at com.github.joschi.jadconfig.validators.StringNotBlankValidator.validate(StringNotBlankValidator.java:25) ~[graylog.jar:?]
at com.github.joschi.jadconfig.validators.StringNotBlankValidator.validate(StringNotBlankValidator.java:11) ~[graylog.jar:?]
at com.github.joschi.jadconfig.JadConfig.validateParameter(JadConfig.java:215) ~[graylog.jar:?]
at com.github.joschi.jadconfig.JadConfig.processClassFields(JadConfig.java:148) ~[graylog.jar:?]
at com.github.joschi.jadconfig.JadConfig.process(JadConfig.java:99) ~[graylog.jar:?]
at org.graylog2.bootstrap.CmdLineTool.processConfiguration(CmdLineTool.java:448) [graylog.jar:?]
at org.graylog2.bootstrap.CmdLineTool.run(CmdLineTool.java:256) [graylog.jar:?]
at org.graylog2.bootstrap.Main.main(Main.java:45) [graylog.jar:?]

[tmacgbay]

@no-good-username

Parameter password_secret should not be blank

Looks like your server.conf file has reverted to default? Hard to tell anything more, I don’t know what version you came from, what commands you ran to upgrade…My guess is you ended up with a fresh install… The Appliance is no longer available and was really intended as an initial testing platform.

[gsmith]

Hello @no-good-username

The Graylog appliance is not created to provide a production ready solution. It is build to offer a fast and easy way to try the software itself and not wasting time to install Graylog and it components to any kind of server. As @tmacgbay stated looks like it revert back to default. If you need this software for more then just looking at it. I would suggest installing Graylog on a dedicated Virtual machine, then installing all its components (Elasticsearch and MongoDB) it from a package handler.

[no-good-username]

That was the step missed, I didn’t have the passwords hashed correctly which broke the thing on service restart…

Also scrapped it and built fresh/new and it’s working wonderfully!

Thanks for the sanity check