# Home directories and SMF Error 96 *July 17, 2013* — https://jade.wtf/tech-notes/smf-error-96/ Tags: SmartOS, SMF --- tl;dr: make sure the user's home directory exists. The other day I was setting up a Tomcat instance (for [Atlassian Stash](http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/)) to run under SMF on [SmartOS](http://smartos.org) with a alternate user and low ports (on 443 without root) and the service kept going into maintenance state with a reason of Start method exited with $SMF_EXIT_ERR_CONFIG and a service log message of: ``` [ Jul 12 20:45:38 Enabled. ] [ Jul 12 20:45:39 Executing start method ("/opt/stash/bin/start-stash.sh"). ] [ Jul 12 20:45:39 Method "start" exited with status 96. ] ``` Everything I found when searching the web referred to config files missing and other sorts of things that are fairly obvious from log messages, except there wasn't anything relevant in the logs. I replaced the start method with a shell script that printed a message to a file in /tmp and the file wasn't updated. That got my focus back on SMF. Why would SMF not run a start method and say it was a configuration error? After a few rounds of checking the SMF manifest and head banging I remembered that I didn't specify -m (create home directory) when I created the user that the service was going to run under. I changed the user's home directory from null to the app's working dir in /var. The service started up after that. I'm not sure why neither SMF's verbose documentation nor the extended documentation online that is referenced in the error mentioned that when you start a service as a user other than root that user has to have a home directory. Instead everything points toward an application configuration error. For reference, the SMF manifest I'm using to start Tomcat (as bundled with Atlassian Stash) is available as a Github Gist: [stash.xml](https://gist.github.com/jda/6024477). --- © 2013 Jade Angrboða.