[Bug]: ERROR: Cannot open database: unable to open database file

[yangfande362]

Steps to Reproduce

Maybe a few of unpredictable power-off. Step-ca can't start normally after some months.

Your Environment

• OS - Ubuntu 22.04
• step-ca Version - Smallstep CA/0000000-dev (linux/amd64) (compiled from the source-code)

Expected Behavior

Can be start normally and loaded the sighed certificate data.

Actual Behavior

Start failed, while the log from start as following:

Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: badger 2026/04/24 13:32:54 INFO: All 1 tables opened in 3ms
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: badger 2026/04/24 13:32:54 INFO: Replaying file id: 0 at offset: 47489457
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: badger 2026/04/24 13:32:54 INFO: Replay took: 141.828989ms
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: ERROR: Cannot open database: unable to open database file
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: WARNING: ESYSDB backend was not initialized.
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: ERROR: Neither FAPI nor ESYSDB backends could be initialized.
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher step-ca[1866040]: error initializing PKCS#11: failed to initialize PKCS#11 library: pkcs11: 0x5: CKR_GENERAL_ERROR
Apr 24 13:32:54 wcu-dispatcher systemd[1]: step-ca.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=2/INVALIDARGUMENT

And the DB files can be seen as follow:

total 86M
-rw------- 1   28 Apr 24 12:07 KEYREGISTRY
-rw------- 1 9.3M Apr 24 12:07 000054.sst
-rw------- 1 1.1K Apr 24 13:32 MANIFEST
-rw-r--r-- 1    8 Apr 24 13:32 LOCK
-rw------- 1  77M Apr 24 13:32 000000.vlog

Additional Context

No response

Contributing

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[netops2devops]

Are you able to open the badgerDB file via step-badger CLI?
https://github.com/lukasz-lobocki/step-badger