Chapter 3   Troubleshooting Installation

Troubleshooting

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This section describes common installation problems and solutions.

You accidentally denied all access to the Administration forms.

Log in as or with the proxy's user account. In the server root directory, edit the magnus.conf file. See the Sun ONE Web Proxy Server 3.6 SP2 Administrator's Guide for more information on this file.

You don't remember on what port your administration server is running.

Look in your ns-admin.conf file, which is in the admserv directory under your iPlanet server directory. In ns-admin.conf, you will find a Port entry that specifies on what port your administration server is located. You can change this value if you want your administration server to run on a different port, but make sure you restart the administration server after you change the value.

Your administration server responds "Unauthorized host" when you try to connect to it.

Open up your administration server to all sites by going into the and deleting the lines for Hosts and Addresses (either of these might not be present). Then restart your administration server . You will then be able to get back into the administration server, where you can try new settings for your host and address restrictions.

You have forgotten the password to your administration server and you can't log in to your administration pages.

Go into your ns-home directory, and into the admserv directory under that. You should find an admpw text file containing a single line of text something like this:

admin:lnOVeixulqkmU

The first part of the line is the name of your administration account (usually just admin), and the second part is your encrypted administration password. Edit this file to remove the encrypted password so that your file looks like this:

admin:

Then shut down your administration server, bring it back up again, and log in to your administration server, but don't give any password. The server should let you in, at which point you can go to the appropriate configuration page to set a new administration password.

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Note

Because it is so easy to change the administration password this way, you should periodically make certain that your administration password file and your web server's configuration files cannot be edited by anyone, and that only trusted people have access to them. (By default these files cannot be edited by anyone, but you should verify this fact occasionally.)

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You don't have access to the proxy.

Log in as root or the proxy's user account. In the server root directory, edit the obj.conf file and remove the following lines:

<Client dns="[wildcardpattern]" ip="[wildcardpattern]">
PathCheck fn=deny-service
</Client>

[wildcardpattern] is a shell expression that matches your DNS or IP address. You can also edit the wildcard patterns so that your user account information isn't included. To deny service to everyone except a select group, use *~ before the wildcard pattern (for example, *~*iplanet.com denies service to everyone except those from the iplanet.com domain). See the Sun ONE Web Proxy Server 3.6 SP2 Administrator's Guide, for more information on wildcard patterns.

Clients can't find the proxy server.

First try using the host name. If that doesn't work, use a fully-qualified name (in the form proxy.subdomain.domain). If that doesn't work, use the dotted quad IP address.

The proxy is slow, and transfers take too long.

The proxy computer might need more RAM to handle the load, or, if other applications are on the proxy machine, they might be degrading proxy performance by using most of the computer's memory.

You can also reduce transfer time by configuring the cache refresh setting. See the Sun ONE Web Proxy Server 3.6 SP2 Administrator's Guide for more information on the cache refresh setting.

When installing my server, I get a message saying not to interrupt while performing the install, but the program doesn't install anything.

Be sure to click on the "Install now" link on the page that says "Do not interrupt." The "Do not interrupt" message refers to the time after the user has clicked install.