MongoDB repair on bad shutdown

I've been working on a little side project and I've been using MongoDB.  One insanely annoying thing I've run into a couple times is if Mongo doesn't shutdown cleanly then you have to repair it. The next time you try to start it up you get errors.  You'd hope that these things would happen automagically but oh well...I'm just starting to learn it so I may be missing out on the larger reason.

You may end up seeing something in the console like this when you try to connect to your local server,

:~$ mongo
MongoDB shell version: 1.8.2
connecting to: test
Tue Jul 26 20:45:17 Error: couldn't connect to server 127.0.0.1 shell/mongo.js:79
exception: connect failed

or this (this one was just me putzing around trying to get it going),

:~$ sudo mongod
mongod --help for help and startup options
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=3358 port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 32-bit
** NOTE: when using MongoDB 32 bit, you are limited to about 2 gigabytes of data
**       see http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations
**       with --dur, the limit is lower
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] db version v1.8.2, pdfile version 4.5
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] git version: 433bbaa14aaba6860da15bd4de8edf600f56501b
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] build sys info: Linux bs-linux32.10gen.cc 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Feb 15 12:39:36 EST 2008 i686 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_37
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] exception in initAndListen std::exception: dbpath (/data/db/) does not exist, terminating
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 dbexit:
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close listening sockets...
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to flush diaglog...
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close sockets...
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] shutdown: waiting for fs preallocator...
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 [initandlisten] shutdown: closing all files...
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 closeAllFiles() finished
Tue Jul 26 20:47:35 dbexit: really exiting now

I found the answer in the comments of this blog.  Run the following commands and all will be well,

sudo rm /var/lib/mongodb/mongod.lock
sudo chown -R mongodb:mongodb /var/lib/mongodb/
sudo -u mongodb mongod -f /etc/mongodb.conf --repair
sudo service mongodb start

 HUZZAH!