Create site fails or ArcGIS Server services cannot be started or viewed after applying updates on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system

Description

Create site fails or ArcGIS Server services cannot be started or viewed after applying updates on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system.

Cause

• The Xvfb-1.17.4-9.0.1 package distributed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s recent update has changed its default behavior and disabled the TCP/IP listening port by default.  ArcGIS Server communicates with Xvfb on a particular port, and it fails when it cannot communicate on that port.
• This affects Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, and CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux versions that provide full binary compatibility with an equivalent supported Red Hat version.  SUSE Linux Enterprise systems are not affected.
• ArcGIS for Server 10.4 and 10.4.1 are not affected as Xvfb is included in the software.

Workaround

1. Check the version of Xvfb package on your RHEL system, you should see Xvfb version is 1.17.x:

   yum list installed | grep -i Xvfb

2. This query should return the following:

   xorg-x11-server-Xvfb.x86_64           1.17.4-9.el6          rhel-x86_64-server-optional-6

3. Once the version of Xvfb package is confirmed at 1.17.x, run the following command as an administrator account to downgrade the Xvfb package:

   yum downgrade Xvfb