WebLogic Admin Tricks & Tips

Usually when you are working on building the platform for any application, you might be given UNIX (Solaris/Linux/HP-UX/AIX) boxes and new generation with Virtual boxes. which contains nothing you need to do many installations and configurations. To make your administrative task easy and simple we need to setup a fine tuned profile file. This profile file will be holding the multiple environment variables those are reusable when you log-on to UNIX Kernel  Here you can define shell functions or you can define simple single lined aliases that makes lengthy commands set to simple trimmed single letter or meaningful words. What is user SHELL and  its profile association? In your UNIX Kernel when a new user login will check the /etc/passwd file which shell is assigned by the super-user. It will look for the system profile and assign the environment values, then on top of it user profile can be loaded. Hence the variable is defined in system profile can be overridden by u...

Configure a WebLogic Server Background Service server running in the background which is very much required in Production and Test Environments where your operating platform is Windows NT based. Whenever the Windows server is rebooted the WebLogic Admin server or Managed servers running on it are going to started automatically, when they are configured with windows ‘services’. Use WebLogic existing Domain or Create a Domain for testing  Create a installation Script per WebLogic server such as AdminServer or Managed Server Create a .cmd let us workout per AdminServer  with the following  Open notepad or any editor to write the following Windows batch Script echo off SETLOCAL set DOMAIN_NAME=demoDomain set USERDOMAIN_HOME=F:\irfan\demoDomain set SERVER_NAME=AdminServer call "F:\Oracle\wlserver\server\bin\installSvc.cmd" ENDLOCAL Write the above code and SAVE it with ‘AdminServerSrv.cmd’ in your domain\bin open a n...

jps - Java process list : Java Utilitycommand  I was looking for diagnostic ways with freely available tools from JDK then I found the great valuable command tool 'jps'. The jps command can be used with three options(l, v, m). it can work for any Java - JEE Servers such as WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat. In other words, any app server that uses the latest JDK 5+ version (version 6, 7, 8 also supports). Let me walk-through those interesting options in Win and *nix platforms. Before you execute this command tool, make sure that JAVA_HOME\bin is in the PATH setting. Java Command tool : jps options jps Option : jps -l this -l option will give the full Java package name that invoked the Java process. C:\Users\pavanbsd>jps -l 9116 sun.tools.jps.Jps 8812 weblogic.Server Filtering the weblogic instance with find command on jps will give you the desired outcome. C:\Users\pavanbsd>jps -l |find "weblogic" 8812 weblogic.Server jps -v this -v option is m...

Problem: Closing startWebLogic.cmd execution window - SHUTDOWN server We were working on Oracle Fusion Middleware environment, where the WLS_FORMS managed server was down. We need to bring it up by starting the server immediately, because it is live we have tried to start with nodemanager. But, it is failed! due to the stdout log rotation failure unable to start the managed server. The servers running on the same Windows machine are well and RUNNING state. Production environments we cannot keep a server DOWN for longer time. So first we tried with immediate temporary solution is to start the managed server from the domain home we need to keep a CMD window open. If someone logged in and closed the window the server will be down again! In UNIX we have nohup and &(ampersand) to run in the background. Now we need similar solution in Windows platform. After working in Unix platform for many years, felt Windows is hard to us!!! There is always a way for this problem. Solution we iden...

As a Middleware Admin, we might need to check the mail service is working or not on the Linux machine or Soloris machine on which our Weblogic running. To monitor and send the traps for issues we must have mail service enabled. In Linux how to check mail service up? We have tried to test the sendmail command from the Linux machine. with the following command: echo "This is the body."| mailx -s "mailx Test1" bhavanishekhar@gmail.com echo "test" | mailx -s "test_sub" bhavanishekhar@gmail.com When I tested with the above test message got the error saying as follows: postdrop: warning: unable to look up public/pickup: No such file or directory. There is no mail service is running you validate the same with the following: We have several options checking the processes list for the pattern 'mail'. $ ps aux | grep mail |grep -v grep $ or use other option is usually the mail service on Unix machine runs on port 25, so grep it fro...

We had an issue on production environment. Suddenly one of the webserver got crashed that no one aware of it. That was happen in the Weekend there were no users accessing at that time. When the business hour started Monday morning customer reported to service desk that one of the URL is not working for them. We middleware support team check the URL and identified that the HTTP server not working. Next action items as you know taking the logs backup and starting the HTTP server done. As part of issue management preventive action to this there could be a monitoring of the URLs. All the web servers hosted application, load balancer that is serving the application or Application server that hosted the web application must be checked randomly or every day before business hours starts. To do this monitoring team started working on listing out all loadbalancer URL, primary, secondary webserver URLs and also Application server hosted URL lists and checking on the browser each URL. Here is t...

Middleware Admin means the day runs with Emergency calls or On-calls, supporting team task always under high pressure cooker -- many of them feel tension tension due to heat in the head many got into hair-fall!!! ... Its a challenging task, only those who can handle the jobs under pressure can do this with tricks. But When you don't have calls you might think to reduce your stress in the work with smart automation scripting to make life more easier. Best Practices for WebLogic Logs If the environment is shorter let say it is size of 10 - 20 managed servers, then the best idea is to implement is that all these managed server logs, JMS stores must shared a common mount point . When application support team run into issues, this will give you the flexibility to search the logs easily and faster way to get rid of issues with this unique log location. In most of your project environments you might find the multiple logs such as application reated, JMS message stores or some tran...