Cannot stop or restart a docker container

Question

When trying to stop or restart a docker container I\'m getting the following error message:

$ docker restart 5ba0a86f36ea
Error response from daemon: Cannot rest         


        

Answer 1

That looks like docker/docker/issues/12738, seen with docker 1.6 or 1.7:

Some container fail to stop properly, and the restart

We are seeing this issue a lot in our users hosts when they upgraded from 1.5.0 to 1.6.0.
After the upgrade, some containers cannot be stopped (giving 500 Server Error: Internal Server Error ("Cannot stop container xxxxx: [2] Container does not exist: container destroyed")) or forced destroyed (giving 500 Server Error: Internal Server Error ("Could not kill running container, cannot remove - [2] Container does not exist: container destroyed")). The processes are still running on the host.
Sometimes, it works after restarting the docker daemon.

There are some workarounds:

I've tried all remote API calls for that unkillable container and here are results:

• json, stats, changes, top, logs returned valid responses
• stop, pause, wait, kill reported 404 (!)

After I finished with remote API, I double-checked docker ps (the container was still there), but then I retried docker kill and it worked! The container got killed and I could remove it.

Or:

What worked was to restart boot2docker on my host. Then docker rm -f

$ boot2docker stop
$ boot2docker start
$ docker rm -f 1f061139ba04