Hanging on boot after upgrading server.app

I have also been having this issue, and the Apple store people straight up told me to just delete everything and start over. Not even allowed to restore from Time Machine. I am starting to try to hack around it now, I'll post back here if I find a solution.

Hello,

I have the exact same issue. I can't believe a clean install is the only solution… I have a fresh Time Machine backup and I don't want to go through the hassle of reinstalling all my system manually.

Booting from an external HD, I deleted all traces of Server.app (the app itself + all preferences files, etc.) on my internal HD. But it still won't boot and it still hangs at "/etc/rc.server: line 14: /etc/rc.server.firewall: No such file or directory" in verbose mode. Why?

There must be a way to prevent Mavericks to check Server at boot. But how?

What machines are you guys using?

I'm on a 2013 15" retina MacBook Pro.

I launched into recovery mode, reformatted my drive, and did a full network recovery.

Then, and here is where I think I went wrong, I restored from my Time Machine backup.

For a long time I didn't see this issue again, but then it reappeared.

However, this time I was able to fix it by starting up in safe mode (which took really long), doing a Disk Utility permissions repair, and then rebooting normally.

It's been working okay since, but I'm still afraid to shut down and reboot my computer...

Cameron, thanks for your feedback.

I'm on a 2011 iMac, with a DIY Fusion Drive (I added a SSD inside). I always had slow startups. I thought it was the custom Fusion Drive's fault, but now I know it was not.

Now I can't boot at all, just after applying the most recent 10.9.2 security update. This is a software issue. The iMac was running Mountain Lion Server, then I upgraded to Mavericks but did not upgrade to Mavericks Server. However there were remains of the old 10.8 Server app.

As I said, yesterday I deleted all those remains (booting from an external drive). However I forgot the most obvious thing: open that **** /etc/rc.server file and comment out line 14.

This morning I booted the iMac again, in verbose mode. The message about /etc/rc.server was not there, at last, but fsck was launched and took a long time. I had to go to work, where I am now, and I don't know if fsck finished its work. I'll let you know...

FIXED! (Well, for the time being...)

When I came back home, nothing has changed (verbose boot) and fsck was completely stalled, without any message. I booted in single user mode, manually ran fsck from the command line, it worked normally (?!?). I booted from an external HD, ran permission repairs on the internal drive, then again everything was OK (?!?). I booted again from the internal HD: nothing happened, startup stalled. (I can't think why fsck always work except in verbose boot...)

Anyway, I booted again from an external drive and followed the instructions given here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4831564?answerId=21335180022#21335180022

Magic: the next boot from the internal drive was successful and very fast. I did not try it several times, though. But I'm really happy not to have to format and reinstall all my system manually!