Knowledgebase

Symptoms

After the most recent updates were run on the server, the cPanel Dovecot SOLR service is no longer able to start. As such, the following errors may be encountered:

[2025-07-02 06:53:14 +0300]      [/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/update-packages] Job for cpanel-dovecot-solr.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status cpanel-dovecot-solr.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

Jul 02 08:40:10 server.hostname.com solr[36301]: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.422-b05, mixed mode)
Jul 02 08:40:10 server.hostname.com solr[36301]: Please install latest version of Java 11 or set JAVA_HOME properly.

Description

The package "tzdata-java" has recently been updated to be compliant with 2025 timezone changes; however, the version of Java used by SOLR is not able to read this updated timezone data. As a result, the cPanel Dovecot SOLR service is no longer able to start.

We've opened an internal case for our development team to investigate this further. For reference, the case number is CPANEL-48037. Follow this article to receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product. 

Workaround

On CentOS/CloudLinux 6 and 7 servers

Downgrade the tzdata-java package on the server:

yum downgrade tzdata-java

To avoid further updates to this package until the issue is resolved, it would also be recommended to version lock this package. The version lock should be removed after this is fixed. Please see the following for information on this process:

How to version lock RPM packages

On servers newer than CentOS/CloudLinux 7

There is no need to downgrade tzdata-java.

Modify /etc/sysconfig/cpanel-dovecot-solr using an editor like vi and change

SOLR_JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.8.0"

to 

SOLR_JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/jre-11"

Then save and restart SOLR

/scripts/restartsrv_cpanel_dovecot_solr