NoSQL databases for PHI

The .ns .0 .1 etc. files are the data files themselves. If you started a mongod instance with a --dbpath argument pointing at that folder, or if you moved the contents somewhere else and used the option to point there, mongod will attempt to read them as normal.

Since your issues suggest corruption and/or some other issue starting mongod (you should really post the startup messages log files, perhaps in a separate question to address that issue), then there are alternatives. For reference, the most common problems are permissions related, especially when people try to start mongod manually (as themselves) or with sudo (as root) and create problematic permissions in the various directories.

You are correct that mongorestore cannot use these data files directly, but mongodump can read them and dump data from them into the BSON files that mongorestore expects.

The option you want here is dbpath. You mention your path is /var/lib/mongo, so you can run something like this:

mongodump --dbpath /var/lib/mongo -d <database name> -o /path/to/put/files

Optionally you can use --repair here too to fix corruption along with the query options in extreme circumstances to get around corrupted sections (rarely, if ever, needed). The various options are described on the mongodump page:

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/mongodump/

Once you dump the files out, you can use mongorestore to reimport them into another mongod instance.

You have linked the relevant official request for this in your answer and SERVER-3748 does explain some of the reasons why these don't currently exist.

The most basic reason is that you cannot start mongos without at least one config server being up and working, otherwise it will refuse to start, which makes it a poor candidate for an init script (external dependencies). Generally you want to avoid having services that are going to fail to start when there is no good way to check the reason for failure.

However, it would still be beneficial to give people a script rather than having them modify/write one themselves, hence the Jira issue exists.

The way I would recommend to do this is to base any script off of the existing mongod init script and simply modify it to replace mongod with mongos where appropriate. Here is the current version of that script for Debian:

https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/debian/init.d

Things you will need to change:

> DAEMON=/usr/bin/mongos
> DESC=mongos-router
> 
> NAME=mongos
> 
> CONF=/etc/mongos.conf 
> PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid 
> ENABLE_MONGODB=yes

The advantage to doing this, after you have installed the 10gen package, is that the users will already be set up and you have the mongod script for reference on the system.

You will need to create the config file with appropriate values for your mongos, and there might be a couple of other things you need to tweak - the key is to test before you make anything permanent.

Once you confirm via testing that you have the script working as you wish, then you can add it permanently with update-rc.d