Common issue starting Tibco EMS on Linux

If you are here probably you have now installed Tibco EMS on a Linux machine and are struggling to get it started. Its is just exiting with a fatal exception and nothing in logs.

This normally happens when you have installed EMS as a root user and are also trying to start as a root. The tibemsd drops the root permission when started as root and thus fall in permission denied traps 🙂

To fix this EMS needs to be started as tibco user. To achieve this we need to add a tibco group and then a tibcouser to this group.

groupadd tibco

Now add user to this group

useradd -G tibco tibcouser

Now assign 777 permissions to this user on ems directory in my case I also changed the owner of ems directory to be tibco group

After setting the permission switch to tibcouser using su command and start the script as tibcouser.

The EMS should be started now.

This issue is documented on tibco community and documentation but a bit hard to dig.