When something goes wrong with the database startup, review the following logs for information.

These files are found in the directory $SWD/vovdbd.

• vovdbd.*.log - The daemon log, which will show if the request to start failed.
• vovdb.*.log - The database utility log, which will show if the start itself failed.
• startdb.*.log -  A condensed version of the start output.

If the logs do not yield anything useful, try the following actions:

1. Increase the verbosity of database-related output. Add: set ::vovutils(verbose)5 to the vovdbd/config.tcl file.
2. Run the vovdb_util startdb -v -v -v command manually, after enabling your shell for the project.
   Check for 'postgres' processes using ps() and grep().
3. Run the low-level database wrapper from a project-enabled shell: vovdb -v -v -v.
   The system will attempt (at the lowest possible level) to start the database. If you get to this point and it still does not work, there may be a problem on the Postgres side.
4. Review dmesg, /var/log/messages, and other system messages for clues.
   We had a case where the database would hang at 'Starting...' at a customer.  It would update the licmon.swd/db/config.tcl file and then stall.

The issue was eventually traced to an NFS mount from a machine that had just been decommissioned.  The same machine was also a Samba server, and this led to smbd processes not terminating properly, eventually putting the LM 'parser' vovslave in OVRLD, which stalled license data collection by sampling.