WCM Syndication may fail if ifixes on the subscriber and syndicator are not at the same level

Assume you ran into some WCM related issues and you were lucky enough to identify a iFix which might fix the problem, The general thought is to apply the iFix on the QA/Stage (Syndicator) and then do the testing and verification, once the testign is passsed apply it on production (Subscriber). This might work well for most of the ifixes which are not related to WCM, but in case of WCM ifixes it might break the syndication between the "Authoring" and the "Rendering" server if the synidcation happens between the time you test in syndicator and before applying to the subscriber. You might see the java.io.InvalidClassException in the logs as shown below during syndication and syndicator status will show a failure.

on Aug 1 17:11:26 EDT 2007 Failed to transform: {7c0007a717ed72a1, com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.HTMLCmpnt, 1187030230711, 63}, Url: http://SomeHost:9081/wps/wcm/connect/?MOD=ItemDispatcher&syndicatorId=e28f92771cc acce&subscriberId=79aeb89771ce1991&subscriptionId=e28f92771ccacce&itemName=7c0 007a717ed72a1:com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.HTMLCmpnt:1187030230711:63,Error: com.aptrix.deployment.subscriber.TransformationException: Code #100, phrase: Generic internal responder error, detail: Exception occurred while trying to retrieve document from item.(Cause: java.io.InvalidClassException: com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.ProfileCmpnt; local class incompatible: stream classdesc serialVersionUID = -7211000162118777127, local class serialVersionUID = 611017038877300726 

The failure reason being is during syndication, WCM objects are serialized and transferred across the network to the subscriber where is get deserialized and stored. So in order for the serialization and deserialization to work properly the Class serialVersionUID of the object should match, so if the ifixes installed are not at the same level then Class serialVersionUID will mismatch which will further result in syndication failure.

So make sure you plan well so that your testing and verification cycle is shorter than your syndication cycle to avoid unnecesary problems. There are also some other reasons that you might encounter this same error , check this technote How to troubleshoot "InvalidClassException" errors during Web Content Management (WCM) syndication to identify and resolve them.

First, move the PDM libraries from one server to another before syndicating WCM Document Manager Components

Using the process of moving PDM libraries from one server to another, although the documents are exported and imported correctly, the exact path within the PDM Library can change. Since WCM stores the path in the WCM PDM Components, that will cause the WCM PDM Component to have an incorrect path.

WCM stores the path to the object within the PDM library when a Document Manager component is created. For example, we may store "/contentRoot/icm:libraries[x]/folder/path/to/document.doc". The value for 'x' in the path can change for document libraries that are imported from another library. So, When syndicating WCM Document Manager Components, the path to the object within PDM can change when the object is exported from the syndicator and imported on the subscriber. This means that on the subscriber, the WCM PDM Component will have the incorrect path stored.


WCM was changed to correct the path when the WCM PDM Component is saved on the subscriber using ifix PK49150 . There are a couple of things to note in this ifix about syndication of PDM components:

1) In order to fix existing PDM components that have the incorrect path stored on the subscriber, the PDM Components need to be resyndicated.
2) When syndicating the WCM PDM Components, if the PDM Document Library has not yet been imported on to the subscriber, the path to the object in the Document Library cannot be updated, because the document does not yet exist in PDM on the subscriber. The WCM object will still be written to the subscriber, but the path will not have been updated correctly. Once the PDM Document Library has been imported to the subscriber, the WCM components will have to be resyndicated.
3) The same holds true if you delete the document library on the subscriber, and reimport the library in. The path to the document library will change, which means that the WCM PDM Components will have to be resyndicated to update the path again.

WebSphere Portal Interview Questions for an Administrator

List of interview questions that i might ask someone for the job of WebSphere Portal Server Administrator. What is the difference between Application Server and Portal Server ? Application servers extend the ability of a Web server to handle Web application requests, and enables a server to generate a dynamic, customized response to a client request. A portal server extends the application server by providing a portlet container that can run portlets and to create portal a website that provides users with a single point of access to Web-based resources by aggregating those resources in one place. What are the steps involved in deploying themes and skins in a clustered production websphere portal environment ? Export the WebSphere wps.ear (Portal EAR) using wsadmin. Use EarExpander tool to expand the exported wps.ear file. Copy the updated themes and skins into ../themes/html, ../skins/html folder. Use EarExpander tool to collapse the EAR directory into an EAR file. Use wsadmin to update the wps.ear to complete the deployment of updated themes and skins. What changes needs to be done to view changes to your theme and skins JSPs without restarting the portal server ? You need to enable automatic JSP loading by setting reloadingEnable property to true in ibm-web-ext.xmi file of the wps.ear. What are the 3 different ways of installing a portlet application in WebSphere Portal ? Install a portlet using the portal administration page using Web Modules portlet. Install a portlet using xmlaccess tool. Pre-deploy a portlet as a standard EAR by installing the portlet WAR file in WAS console and then registering the portlet using xmlaccess. What is the purpose of XMLAccess configuration file Export.xml & ExportRelease.xml ? What is the difference ? & When will you use one over the other ? Export.xml exports the complete portal configuration and useful when transferring configurations between development installations. ExportRelease.xml exports the complete portal configuration from the release domain as required by the portal ReleaseBuilder tool and useful when tranaferring different release configurations between staging and production environments. List me the steps involved in building a release in WebSphere Portal ? If you have a completely new installation of the staging server and the production server: Install the staging server, then install the production server. Develop a release on the staging server. Build the release on the staging server. Empty portal contents on the production server by running the WPSconfig.sh|bat action-empty-portal task. Import that release onto the production server. Refer to Transferring a complete configuration for information. If you already have a production server without a staging system: Export the release of your production server. Install an empty staging server using one of the following two methods: Install the staging server with the flag -W emptyPortal.active=True. After installing and configuring the staging server, run the WPSconfig.sh|bat action-empty-portal task. Import the production release onto the staging server. Refer to Transferring a complete configuration for information. Develop and build a new release on the staging server. Export that new release from the staging server. Use ReleaseBuilder to generate the differential between the two releases. Import the differential onto the production server. What is the purpose of ReleaseBuilder tool in WebSphere Portal ? ReleaseBuilder enables management of release configurations independent of user configurations and used during staging of follow-on releases of WebSphere portals, configurations, and artifacts need to be moved between systems. What are the steps involved in editing WebSPhere Member Manager (wmm.xml) files on a federated node ? On the primary node of the WebSphere Portal cluster, check out the files using ./WPSconfig.sh check-out-wmm-cfg-files-from-dmgr task. Make any changes to the Member Manager files. The files can be edited in the portal_server_root/wmm directory on the WebSphere Portal node. When you have completed your changes, check the files back in using ./WPSconfig.sh check-in-wmm-cfg-files-to-dmgr. How to change the default portal URI /wps/portal after installation ? Set the property WpsContextRoot to the new URI and run ./WPSConfig.sh modify-servlet-path task. List different types of user registry supported by WebSphere Portal ? LDAP (includes LDAP with an optional database user registry). Database user registry. Custom User registry, (non-LDAP, non-database). What is LDAP realm support and why would I want to use it? A Realm allows you to group users from one or more LDAP trees of one user registry and expose them as a coherent user population to WebSphere Portal; this is also referred to as horizontal partitioning. Realms allow a flexible user management with various configuration options; for example, you can combine principals from one or more corporate LDAP tree. A realm must be mapped to a Virtual Portal to allow the realm's defined user population to login to the Virtual Portal. What is an Application group and why would I want to use it ? Application groups is a concept that allows you to define user groups within the database user registry with members (users or groups) contained in the LDAP user registry you configured. The benefit of application groups is that you can create Groups that are only used in WebSphere Portal particularly in scenarios where there is Read-only LDAP or special group setup specific to the portal. What are the two methods to install the empty staging WebSphere portal server ? Empty portal contents on the staging server by running the ./WPSconfig.sh action-empty-portal. Install portal with the ./install.sh -W emptyPortal.active="True" option. How do you stop portal traffic to the node being upgraded in 24x7 cluster upgrade process ? Locate the cluster member being upgraded, and change the value in the Configured weight column from a value to zero and make sure the plugin config information is propagated to webserver to stop traffic. How to set limits on searches for users and groups ? Setting a maximum number of search results maximumSearchResults="200" in wmm.xml What portal resources are scoped for virtual portal ? Portal pages. Portlet instances. Portal Search Engine search services and search collections. This includes the search content sources. What portal resources can't be seperated for virual portal ? Themes and skins. Vault segments and vault slots. Supported clients and markups. Composite applications and templates. Policies. How do you enable temporary and extended trace logging for WebSphere Portal ? Temporary traces can be set for a temporary period by using the administration portlet Enable Tracing or the IBM WebSphere Application Server administrative console and also using the Enable Tracing portlet in the portal administration page. To enable extended trace settings for a longer period of time, that is, for more than one session, switch them on in the WebSphere Application Server configuration, save the updates and restart the portal server. What are the different states of the syndication process ? Idle: No syndication is occurring. Pending: A request has been made to the syndicator, but it has yet to initiate a request to the syndication application. Queued: The syndicator has sent a request to the syndication application, but syndication is not yet active. Active: Syndication is occurring between the syndicator and subscriber. Disabled: Syndication is currently disabled. What are the two types of rendering portlets ? Local rendering portlet and Remote rendering portlet. You can also find answers to all of the questions in the WebSphere Portal 6.0 Information Center or check the WebSphere Portal Books

Script to find prerequisite ifixes for WebSphere Portal

Eventhough IBM fix central http://www-933.ibm.com/eserver/support/fixes/fixcentral provides a way of identifying ifix prequisites and downloading them, it's not efficient as some of the problems still prevail like , it's not upto date that you might not be able to find certain latest prequisites for recent ifix releases, which might lead you to go through manually of each of the ifixes one by one and find the prequisites list, which is really a pain and sometimes buggy when list is large in case of WCM related ifixes. So in order to ease the pain i wrote a shell script that will provide a prerequisite ifixes jar files. please copy the below script into a ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh script file and run it with the required parameters. Note that you also need to have the all ifix zip files for the version you needed for which can be usually requested to send those to you through FTP from IBM Support by opening a PMR .

To find the prequisite for an ifix:
./ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh --ifix PK66778 --ifixesDir /home/allifixes
--ifix - name of the ifix that it's prerequisites needs to be found
--ifixesDir - directory where all the ifixes for particular version are copied

When you run the command all the prerequisite jars are copied to the ./prerequisites directory.

Sample Output: 
bash-2.05b# ./ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh --ifix PK66778 --ifixesDir ../ 
...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PK66778 prerequisites are available at ./prerequisites

ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh

#!/bin/bash
export WAS_HOME=/usr/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer
export JAVA_HOME=$WAS_HOME/java/
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME:$PATH


function usage() {
echo "usage: $0  --ifix  name --ifixesDir directory"
echo "e.g ifixprerequisitefinder.sh --ifix PK66778 --ifixesDir /home/portal/ifixes"
}

function findPrereqs() {
cp $ifixDir/*$1.zip .
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
jar=$(${JAVA_HOME}/bin/jar -xvf *$1.zip | grep .jar | awk '{print$2}')
efixFile=$(${JAVA_HOME}/bin/jar -tvf $jar  | grep efixDriver | awk '{print$8}' | xargs -i ${JAVA_HOME}/bin/jar -xvf $jar {}| awk '{p
rint$2}')
echo -n "......................"
cat $efixFile | grep -i efix-id | sed 's/\[[[:digit:]]*]/:/' | sed 's/\s//g' | cut -c10-16 | xargs -i ./ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh --
ifix {} --ifixesDir $ifixDir
else
echo "Warning !: ifix $1 is  missing which is a prerequisite , please copy the ifix.zip file to ifixesDir to have a complete prereau
isites"
fi
}

while [ -n "$1" ]; do
    case "$1" in
    --ifix)
        shift
        currentJar=$1
        if [ -z $currentJar ]; then
                echo "Missing ifix Name " >&2
                usage
                exit 1
        fi
        ;;
    --ifixesDir)
        shift
        ifixDir=$1
        if [ -z "$ifixDir" ]; then
            echo "Missing ifixDir" >&2
            usage
            exit 1
        fi
        ;;
    esac
    shift
done
if [ -z "currentJar" ]; then
        echo "Missing ifix name  to run" >&2
        usage
        exit 1
fi
if [ -z "$ifixDir" ]; then
        echo "Missing ifixes directory  to run" >&2
        usage
        exit 1
fi
if [ ! -e ./prerequisites ]; then
mkdir ./prerequisites
fi
findPrereqs $currentJar
pc=$(ps -ef | grep -c ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh)
if [ $pc -lt 4 ]; then
c=$(ps -ef | grep -c ifixPrerequisiteFinder.sh)
if [ $pc -lt 4 ]; then
mv ./*.jar ./prerequisites
mv ./*.txt ./prerequisites
echo ""
echo $currentJar prerequisites are available at ./prerequisites
fi
exit 0

Reduce deployment time of web applications and portlets

This might be a useful tip for WebSphere & Portal Administrators particularly, when manually deploying large in size web applications and portlets. Adminstrators who normally deploy applications in non-business hours might be probably working from home and use slow speed connections compared to the office connection causing the upload time for the apps to take for ever, plus the timeout and disconnects can cause frustration and fatigue.

By tuning your client OS network settings can provide some relief, By default Windows XP network settings are far below the standard of hardware and network speed that we use nowadays. Hence, Depending on the type of network connection you have, you might be able to tweak your connection so that the speed of your Internet, as well as your local area network, will be faster. By hacking the System Registry and editing the TCP/IP parameters, you can fine-tune the values to take advantage of more reliable, faster Internet connections, such as DSL and cable.

When i was researching , I came across this article Hacking Windows XP: Speed Up Your Network and Internet Access and by following it i was able to improve by netowrk performance of my Windows XP laptop to 4-6 times , Hence i would recommend for the administrators to do the same or atleast the last section "Tweaking your Internet connection for speed " to resolve most of their deployment problems due to network slowness. Not only this reduced the deployment time , it also helped when transfering huge and large number of doucments from PDM libraries using PDM desktop component, while uploading logs to IBM support , prevented IE browser timeouts, etc. Note users with Linux or MAC desktop/laptop clients may not experience this issue as the default network settings on this OS are fair enough to get optimal speeds.

Disk space problems in WebSphere Portal Installations

You might have powerful servers like Dell PowerEdge servers with quad core processors to run your WebSphere Portal, but servers do most of the time come up with a little disk storage space with faster disks compare to your laptop or desktop disks,which nowadays they even come up with 1 TB (TeraByte) in capacity for few hundred dollars. Unless you periodically clean up the unwanted files you would easily end up using the disk space and run into problems. Below are some of the locations within WebSphere Portal installation that you can monitor to cleanup unwanted files,

Cleanup IBM JVM javacore and heapdump files

IBM javacore and heapdumps might be automatically created due to OutOfMemory errors or when jvm crashes due to certain conditions, or it can be user initiated to debug certain problems like hanging threads, high cpu utilization and memory leaks. Javacore ( javacore.20080306.020447.11544.txt ) and heapdumps ( heapdump.20080128.195700.20399.phd ) files can be found under WAS_HOME/profiles/Portal01 directory usually in sizes of several mega bytes depending on your applications and when several of them gets created you might easily run into disk space problems. Clean up or move these files as and when necessary and work with IBM support to debug this issue and prevent these files from getting generated.

JCR Search Indexes might get huge in size

JCR Search indexes that are created under WPS_HOME/jcr/search can sometimes be large in size particularly docsdata.dat in terms of several GB's more than the actual content size itself, so whenever you think the size is large than what your content size itself , then it's safe to delete all the contents under WPS_HOME/jcr/ directory and restart WebSphere Portal to recreate the indexes.

Archived Portlet Applications .ear files

Archived Portlet Applications .ear files are created under the WPS_HOME/deployed directory everytime you install a portlet application, the number of files will get increased particulary when you do several deployments, particulary this can happen during your development cycles. As long as you are not required to locally archive these files on that specific system, then they can be safely removed (i.e., deleted or moved to another storage location.)

Rotate SystemErr.log, trace.log and SystemOut.log

By default WebSphere Portal keeps upto 5 historical files with sizes of 5 MB each and will start rotating the logs. Sometimes it seems low because log files gets huge quickly when you enable additional tracing and u that yodon't want to loose the trace information during the problem recreation if it start rotating the logs. so choose the size of a file and the number of historical files wisely and not overrun your disk space. Also native_stderr.log and native_stdout.log don't get rotated , hence you need to periodically clean the files or zero the file size, as i have seen problems that WebSphere process would hung if native_stdout.log file get to 4GB in size and it won't come up until you clean and restart, particularly in linux environment.

Use disk usage (du) command to determine huge directory size

After checking all the above you might still run into unknown large files like applicaton logs, core dumps , etc. so in order to find them, run this command ls -d * | xargs -i bash -c 'echo {};du -ch $PWD/{}/| grep total' | grep G -B 1 which will list you directory and files who sizes that are in GB, based on the results you should be able to make discussion with the respective team and delete them if they are not needed.

I will keep them updated when i find some more.

Intermittent slowness in websphere portal server java process

In a 2 node WebSphere Portal Cluster with WCM installed/enabled you might see performance degradation on either of the nodes randomly and you might see resources are used up more like CPU and IO on one node compared to the other. This might keep changing between nodes. From further investigation we found the root cause is JCR Search Indexer, the search indexer is started based on which node is started first, hence it seems to be random node performance issues. We haven't got a definitive answer from IBM , so went ahead and turned off the JCR Search Indexer and that fixed the issue which anyway we are not using the search index in our production server.

Steps to disable JCR Search Indexer.

• Go to [WPS_ROOT]\jcr\lib\com\ibm\icm\icm.properties
• Set ‘jcr.textsearch.enabled’ to false
• You will need to restart the portal server for the changes to take effect.
• Repeat the steps in each node.

Note this setting won't affect the Portal Search which is different from the Web Content Management AuthorTime Search OR PDM Search where the JCR index is utilized.

Beware of the login attribute length limitation in WebSphere Portal

Beware of the login attribute limitation of 32 characters in length in WebSphere Portal 6.0 using WCM and when connecting to Java Content Repository (JCR) which is nothing but PDM (Portal Document Manager). So when designing and choosing a login attribute ( uid, cn , samAccountName, email) for your portal application you should carefully select or enforce the attribute in such a way that it's not more than 32 characters in length. This really makes the life difficult as you can't even use the basic email address as your login attribute as there is a possibility that some valid email addresses will easily more than characters for example, the world's richest Warren Buffet warren.buffet@berkshirehathaway.com can't even register with your website. Good news to all this is that they support upto 175 character length in the newer WebSphere Portal 6.1 release.

Certain symptoms you might notice are that users with more than 32 characters of login id might complain about missing images or document that is referred in the webpage from PDM or WCM and you might see the following exception in the logs during their login.

Error logging in: com.ibm.content.exception.LoginException:
javax.jcr.LoginException: Unable to establish session with DB2® Content
Manger Runtime Edition for User
 

Live Popularity Of Enterprise Portal Server Market by Google Keword Search using Yahoo Pipes

I just came across this interesting mashup kind of a tool called Yahoo Pipes an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. I was thinking to use the pipes to build something relevant to my websphere blog and then decided to build a pipe which basically plot a enterpise portal popularity graph based on the total number of realtime google search results returned for each of the popular portal servers names like WebSphere Portal, Weblogic Portal, Sun One, Sharepoint, Jboss and Oracle. You can see the source of the pipe here http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=269ed254b3df0a7426e34187c98c0d17 The results also kind of confirmed the truth with this news that IBM WebSphere Portal is the leader in Enterprise portal market.

If you are not seeing the graph below please click here , because it seems like google search blocks yahoo pipes for making repeated calls, you will see the graph snapshot that was taken on July 13th 2008.

IBM HTTP Server child process core dumps

IBM HTTP Server child process core dumps failing to serve some or all of the requests. You might see the following Segmentation fault errors in the error.log of the server.

[Sun Feb 10 19:26:52 2008] [notice] IBM_HTTP_Server/6.1.0.9 Apache/2.0.47 (Unix) configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sun Feb 10 19:26:52 2008] [notice] CoreDumpDirectory not set; core dumps may not be written for child process crashes
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:20 2008] [notice] child pid 7755 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:21 2008] [notice] child pid 7756 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:23 2008] [notice] child pid 7758 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:25 2008] [notice] child pid 7759 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:26 2008] [notice] child pid 7760 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:27 2008] [notice] child pid 7761 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:27:37 2008] [notice] child pid 7762 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:29:36 2008] [notice] child pid 7763 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:29:49 2008] [notice] child pid 7771 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:30:21 2008] [notice] child pid 7772 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 19:30:27 2008] [notice] child pid 7773 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Feb 10 20:12:12 2008] [notice] child pid 8056 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

In our case the problem appears to be that we had mistakenly specified the ResponseChunkSize value that is too high like 400000. This value is the number of 1024 byte pages so it is multipled by 1024 which exceeds an acceptable value. so setting it to a lower value of 4000 seems to have resolved the issue. It took several days before we could figure out the issue after working with IBM, and these are following steps you can do that might help debugging the issue if in your case is not related to the ResponseChunkSize.

Please do the following:

1. To set up system to obtain cores:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/httpserv/ihsdiag/coredumps.html

2. Make sure you have latest IHSDIAG for debugging IHS issues.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24008409

3. Run IHSDIAG against core that is obtained:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/httpserv/ihsdiag/gather_crash_doc.html

4. Run IHSDIAG against good system to get system information:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/httpserv/ihsdiag/describeconfig.html

Finding websites running WebSphere Portal

I used to wonder which websites or companies are using IBM WebSphere Portal Server. The easiest way to find them is to do a Google search on /wps/portal keyword which is nothing but the default context root or the base url for WebSphere Portal. I was surprised to see several websites ranging from government websites of different countries, banks, retail, telecom etc. The search should return all websites running websphere portal with default context root /wps/portal unless they have changed it using modify-servlet-path task which i believe atleast 80%-90% of installation wouldn't have done.

OutOfMemory errors with WebSphere Portal

WebSphere Portal server might throw OutOfMemory (OOM) errors and might got hung and unresponsive when serving or dowloading large documents through WCM (IBM Workplace Web Content Management ) which are stored in PDM (Portal Document Manager). You might see the following error in SystemErr.log and the JVM might have produced a heapdump,

[5/14/08 14:35:32:984 PDT] 00000086 ModuleManager E   IWKCT1382X: Major exception caught: com.presence.connect.business.module.ErrorExecutingRequestException: IWKMU1062X: Message: IWKCT1366X: Exception caught servicing a Servlet request for PDMProxy, Cause: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
[5/14/08 14:35:32:985 PDT] 00000086 ModuleManager E   IWKCT1383X: Unexpected error from Module. Details of cause to follow:
[5/14/08 14:35:32:986 PDT] 00000086 ModuleManager E   
                                 java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
        at com.presence.connect.connector.content.ContentAPIConnection.getBytes(ContentAPIConnection.java(Compiled Code))
        at com.presence.connect.connector.content.ContentAPIConnection.getItemContents(ContentAPIConnection.java:516)
        at com.presence.connect.connector.content.ContentAPIConnector.getItemContents(ContentAPIConnector.java:216)
        at com.aptrix.pluto.resource.PDMResourceUtils.createPDMMime(PDMResourceUtils.java:632)
        at com.aptrix.pluto.resource.PDMResourceUtils.getPDMData(PDMResourceUtils.java:419)
        at com.aptrix.pluto.resource.PDMResourceServerModule.getResourceMime(PDMResourceServerModule.java:968)
        at com.aptrix.pluto.resource.PDMResourceServerModule.buildResponse(PDMResourceServerModule.java:516)
        at com.aptrix.pluto.resource.PDMResourceServerModule.retrieveResource(PDMResourceServerModule.java:355)
        at com.aptrix.pluto.resource.PDMResourceServerModule.process(PDMResourceServerModule.java:276)
        at com.presence.connect.business.module.ModuleManager.launchBusiness(ModuleManager.java:121)
        at com.presence.connect.business.module.ModuleManager.launchBusiness(ModuleManager.java:384)
        at com.presence.connect.RequestExecutable.execute(RequestExecutable.java:84)
        at com.presence.connect.dispatcher.Task.run(Task.java:151)
        at com.presence.connect.ConnectClient.processSynchronous(ConnectClient.java:167)
        at com.presence.connect.ConnectServlet.process(ConnectServlet.java:298)
        at com.presence.connect.ConnectServlet.doGet(ConnectServlet.java:120)
        at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:743)
        at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:856)
        at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper.service(ServletWrapper.java:1572)
        at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper.handleRequest(ServletWrapper.java(Compiled Code))

In order to resolve the issue please apply the IBM recommended ifix PK66778 and tune the JVM heap size, xloratio , pCluster & kCluster based on your application needs, expected load and the optimum performance. IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer (GCMV) which is a part of IBM Support Assistant Tools can help you tune these parameters based on the Garbage Collection logs history.

Performance issues with 'Manage Users and Groups' portlet in WebSphere Portal

There are situations like when assigning a member to a group or creating a new member for a group, listing users for a group, etc may result in poor or slow performance or even browser timeout with the 'Manage Users and Groups' portlet. These especially happends when a large number of users in a group or large number of groups exists in the ldap server. To avoid such conditions you might want to modify these configuration parameters http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=688&ca=portall2&uid=swg21247210 of the 'Manage Users and Groups' portlet based on your needs.

Login into WebSphere Portal very slow with Sun ONE LDAP

Login into WebSphere Portal very slow with Sun ONE LDAP particularly when the user belongs to a group that has about thousands of users or more and the ldap is not providing you the capability to evaluate the group memberships from user object directly (nsRole:nsRole for SunONE directory if groups are created with Role inside SunONE ). For this case, group membership searches are performed by locating the user on the member list of groups and for some reason the search takes long time even though the attributes are indexed like uid or even the uniqueMemeber. In order to fix the problem please ask youe ldap administrator to do the following in the ldap instance,

1. create a file ldaptune.txt with the following:

dn: cn=config,cn=ldbm database,cn=plugins,cn=config
changetype: modify
replace: nsslapd-search-tune
nsslapd-search-tune: 49

2. Implement by running the below coomand:

ldapsearch -h -p -D "cn=directory manager" -w -f ldaptune.txt

3. Restart the LDAP instance

At this point, redo your search test. Search result time should be shorter. If you are still running into problems double check whether the parameter is set properly or contact Sun Support.

Info on the nsslapd-search-tune parameter can be viewed at:

http://blogs.sun.com/DirectoryManager/entry/the_truth_about_nsslapd_search

PDM portlet not working after upgrading to WPS 6.1.0.2 or WCM 6.1.0.2

You might notice that pdm portlet (Portal Document Library ) might not function properly after upgrading to WPS 6.1.0.2 WP_PTF_6012 (IBM WebSphere Portal, Version 6.0.1.2 Fix Pack)or WCM 6.1.0.2 (WCM_PTF_6012 (Web Content Management, Version 6.0.1.2 Fix Pack), symptoms include,

1) PDM portlet will be unresponsive when you click on any of the folder strcuture and trying to navigate through it as show below.


2) The left navigation file tree view of the pdm portlet will be empty.


3) you may not able to browse the document libraries from the WCM portlet when trying to refer a document component from WCM Authoring portlet.


In order to fix the problem goto the WebSphere Adminconsole (Dmgr or AppServer)and do the following,

When the Document Manager Web module is redeployed, its groups must be mapped to the All Authenticated group in WebSphere. To map the groups, follow these steps:

Select the Document Manager application, as follows:
Expand Applications.
Select Enterprise Applications.
Locate the application that starts with Document Manager.
Click Map Security Roles to Users/Groups.
Assign the Authenticated role to the All Authenticated group.
Save your changes.
Restart the portal or sync the nodes and restart the portal cluster.