A Portal to a Portal

Do I feel silly ?

Spent a fair part of yesterday afternoon trying to work out why a previously working VMware image of WebSphere Portal 6.0 Express on Red Hat Enterprise Linux would not work. I could start the server, but not log in. I went through a lot of PD and, to crown it all, ended up assuming that I'd forgotten the admin. password so reinstalled Poral from scratch. Post-installation, that worked OK, but after a restart, I got the same problem.

I spent an hour on the train this AM, and couldn't crack it - this was the first error that I was seeing: -

[25/02/08 08:14:41:246 GMT] 0000000a SystemErr R com.ibm.websphere.scheduler.SchedulerNotAvailableException: SCHD0124E: Unable to initialize wps/Scheduler due to error: com.ibm.ws.extensionhelper.exception.UnableToInitializeException: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: xaConnect

I did all the usual things: -

• ensured that DB2 was started
• ensured that I could see wpsdb in the database catalog ( DB2 LIST DB DIRECTORY )
• ensured that I could connect to wpsdb ( DB2 CONNECT TO WPSDB USER WPDB2INS USING PASSWORD )
• ensured that I could get some data ( DB2 "SELECT * FROM WPDB2INS.WMMUSERREG" )
• etc.
  

I also checked that I could start/use server1, which doesn't use DB2 for authentication and, therefore, is fine ).

Thankfully, Google had the answer, Google is my friend :-)

And I'm embarrassed to admit that it was my old favourite WebSphere on Unix problem - WAS cannot "see" DB2 unless you ensure that the DB2 libraries etc. are added to root's user environment. This is most easily done using the command: -

. /home/wpdb2ins/sqllib/db2profile

( note the leading characters )

Now I've been working with WAS on Unix for about 8 years, and yet I forgot this most basic problem.

Can you say "Doh" ??

Anyhow, I ran the command, and WebSphere Portal came up like a dream - no errors in SystemErr.log and able to log in and play away, play away, play away.

In the end, I added this command to .bash_profile in order that it runs each time I boot up.

Hey, you learn something OLD every day :-)

# posted by Dave Hay : 10:14