Friday, March 6, 2009

Poll : What version of WebSphere are you using ?



What version of WebSphere you are using ?













Thursday, September 11, 2008

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.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

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.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

WebSphere Portal Interview Questions for an Administrator



List of interview questions that i might ask someone for the job of WebSphere Portal Server Administrator.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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).

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. How to set limits on searches for users and groups ?

    Setting a maximum number of search results maximumSearchResults="200"
    in wmm.xml

  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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.

  20. 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





Wednesday, July 2, 2008

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.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

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.