Monday 25 February 2008

Egg, rather than coffee, on face

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 :-)

3 comments:

marneum said...

As a newbie to Portal it took me some days to find out about these two problems: start DB2 properly and set the variables. Why is this not mentioned in the WPX Info Center ideally at a place where I can find it?
Ahhhhh!

ender said...

it's a typical one! I fell on the same the first time i touched portal on red hat. Nice post

Dave Hay said...

I found out recently, whilst attending a Lotus Connections class, that the Unix command source is the same as using the before the db2profile command. This also applies to the setupCmdLine.sh script that WAS requires for many, many fine things.

Visual Studio Code - Wow 🙀

Why did I not know that I can merely hit [cmd] [p]  to bring up a search box allowing me to search my project e.g. a repo cloned from GitHub...