Johan Wikman added a comment - 2020-12-22 07:27 The primary problem is logdir=/home/mysql/log/maxscale_load_split.log because the argument to --logdir should be an existing directory and not the name of a file. The log directory is set immediately when the flag is encountered and as --config-check has not been seen at that point, MaxScale will attempt to log it to the default log, which is that /var/log/maxscale and fail. You can fix the problem by Putting --config-check first, in which case MaxScale will just complain about that non-existent /home/mysql/log/maxscale_load_split.log , or provide an existing directory as argument to --logdir in which case there will be nothing to complain about the arguments themselves.