| Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition Troubleshooting Guide |
Appendix B
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)These frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) in this appendix are sorted into the following sections:
Installation and Initial AccessThis section addresses the following questions:
How do I obtain version information?
In the Administration interface, click the server instance name in the left panel and select the General tab to see the Install Version information in the right panel.
At the command line, use the asadmin version command:
version [--user admin_user] [--password admin_password] [--host localhost] [--port 4848] [--local=false] [--verbose=false]
You can also check the /var/sadm/install/productregistry XML file for the Sun One Application Server.
How do I access the sample applications?
You can tour the features of the Sun ONE Application Server by running the sample applications. Access the start page here:
install_dir/samples/index.html
LicensingThis section addresses the following questions:
How do I renew an expired evaluation license?
Update the license using the asadmin install-license command.
Instructions are contained in the Licensing appendix of the Sun ONE Application Server Installation Guide
Can I upgrade from an evaluation license to a full Sun ONE Application Server 7 license?
Not if you selected the evaluation version that includes Sun ONE Studio. In this case, it is not possible to upgrade from Evaluation license to full license. You must uninstall the evaluation version using the uninstallation program, then install a new Standard Edition version.
Maybe, if you installed the evaluation version that does not include Sun ONE Studio (you must also have an unlimited license). Follow these steps:
- Go to the Sun ONE Application Server 7 home directory.
- Go to the /bin dir.
- Run the asadmin command.
This starts a new session with the prompt asadmin>
- Enter the command display-licence.
The licence details are displayed.
- Check whether you have unlimited licence. If you don’t, you cannot upgrade.
- Enter the install-licence command.
You will be prompted for your key.
- Copy and paste the key from the following location:
http://edist.central/
In a media package, how do I get the license key?
The software license key, also known as the activation code, is on the welcome card in the media package.
How can I get an evaluation license for Enterprise Edition?
there isn’t one
Platform SupportMost questions about supported platforms for Sun ONE Application Server 7 can be found in the Platform Summary documents for the various releases here:
This section addresses the following questions:
What’s the difference between Platform Edition, Standard Edition, and Enterprise Edition?
The basic distinction between PE and SE is that SE allows remote administration and PE does not. Remote administration refers to the ability to manage and monitor a Sun ONE Application Server instance from another machine on the network. To administer a PE instance, you have to be running the graphical interface or the command-line interface on the machine where that PE instance is installed.
The basic difference between PE/SE and EE is that EE provides the High Availability features like load balancing (LB) and Session Persistence (SP) with existing PE/SE functionality. Please check the release notes of EE version for specific details of LB and SP.
What Sun ONE Message Queue versions are supported?
Which versions of Sun ONE Message Queue are supported with which versions of Sun ONE Application Server?
What J2SE versions are supported?
What database drivers are supported?
The Application Server 7 product is designed to support connectivity to any database management system with a corresponding JDBC driver. Refer to the Sun ONE Application Server Platform Summary for a list of the components that Sun has tested and found to be acceptable for constructing J2EE-compatible database configurations.
Additional driver have been tested to meet the JDBC requirements of the J2EE 1.3 platform with the following JDBC Driver Certification Program:
These drivers can be used for JDBC connectivity with the Application Server. Although Sun offers no product support for these drivers, we will support the use of these drivers with the Application Server.
Is JADO supported for Sun ONE Application Server 7?
Answer: Java Data Objects (JADO) is used under the covers for the container-managed persistence (CMP) engine. JDO is not exposed/supported.
Does Sun ONE Application Server 7 have a JCA connector to talk to SAP R3?
Our ISV partners for JCA connectors are Insevo, Attachmate, iWay, and Seagull. They have ported to Sun ONE Application Server 7.
Are custom authorization providers supported?
As a J2EE 1.3 product, Sun ONE Application Server 7 does not support custom authorization providers. Custom authorization plug-in support is defined by JSR-115 (JACC) which was only introduced in J2EE 1.4. This will be supported in a future release.
How is load balancing supported?
Definitely yes, on Enterprise Edition. The load balancer plug-in is a new component of this version and is fully documented in Enterprise Edition of the Sun ONE Application ServerAdministrator’s Guide.
On PE and SE, the web connector on a web server that fronts PE and SE cannot do load balancing at all. However, with SE, a load distribution capability is enabled. In PE, the web connector (also called the reverse proxy) installed in a web server fronting a PE installation can send traffic to one and only one Sun ONE Application Server instance.
However in SE, the web connector can do load distribution. The connector can interrogate the URI in the request and determine which of several Sun ONE Application Server instances is to service the request. The mapping of the URI to an application server instance is a fixed 1:1 relationship. That is, requests sent to http://www.abc.com./xyz/... will always be distributed to the single Sun ONE Application Server instance that services the xyx URI.
For both PE and SE, you can have authentic load balancing by using a third-party product to front the web server or the actual application server instances themselves. If HttpSession is used in the application, you will want to turn on sticky load balancing based upon embedded tags or cookies. Before a session is established, the third-party load balancer could use techniques like round robin and weighted round robin load balancing to direct traffic to any of the Sun ONE Application Server instances. Thereafter, with sticky enabled, the load balancer will stick all subsequent processing to the application server instance that created the original session.
Functional SupportCan remote EJB clients use something other than RMI over IIOP, or is that the only support protocol?
According to the J2EE spec, RMI/IIOP is the proposed way of remotely interacting directly with an enterprise bean inside an EJB container. However, you can wrap that bean as a web service and access it using SOAP/HTTP (SOAP over HTTP). You can also use a MOM approach using JMS destinations (queues and topics) as another way of interacting with the functionality of the bean.
Is sticky load balancing supported?
Not for PE and SE. The Sun ONE Application Server reverse proxy plug-in (web connector) cannot channel HTTP requests based upon Session ID. However, if you use a load balancing facility from another vendor that will do the sticky load balancing, you can deploy it in front of your application servers (or web servers, if the Sun ONE Application Server reverse proxy plug-in is installed) to provide sticky load balancing.
Yes for EE. Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition load balancer uses a sticky round robin algorithm to load balance incoming HTTP and HTTPS requests. The load balancer plug-in uses the following methods to determine session stickiness:
Are multiple JVMs for hosting components supported?
With both PE and SE, you can create multiple application server instances for a given product installation. By default, the first server instance will be named server1. You can then use the Administration interface to create a second instance called, for example, server2. Once started, both server1 and server2 will have their own separate JVMs. However, a given instance (such as server1) has one and only one JVM. Instances do not share JVMs.
High-AvailabilityThis section addresses the following questions:
Where are the load balancer files?
The load balancer configuration files, sun-loadbalancer_1_0.dtd and loadbalancer.xml, should be in the following locations:
How do I enable the health checker?
To enable the health checker for the load balancer, edit the following properties int the loadbalancer.xml file:
Server Administration and OperationThis section addresses the following questions:
How do I start a single application server instance rather than all the instances in a domain?
To start individual instances in the default domain (domain1), use the asadmin start-instance command as follows:
start-instance server3
To start all instances in the default domain (domain 1), use the asadmin start-appserver command.
What is the ‘Apply Changes Required’ message about?
What is happening when I receive the Apply Changes Required message in the Administration interface? I made my changes and pressed the Save button. Why do I have to also Apply Changes?
When you make your changes to a configuration setting for an instance and click Save, the update is written to a temporary file called server.xml.changes in a backup subdirectory under the /config directory. The actual server.xml file, stored in the main /config directory, represents the current configuration of the server. This file has yet to be updated. When you "Apply Changes" as prompted, the contents of the server.xml.changes file are applied to the server.xml file in the main /config directory. When the update is successful, the server.xml.changes file is deleted from the /config/backup directory.
This is a good feature because it allows you to make a number of configuration changes without needing to apply them to the running server one at a time. It is essentially6 a batch update feature.
Why are multiple IIOP listeners useful and how many listeners are allowed?
When configuring the ORB in the Admin Console, you can have multiple IIOP Listeners. The intention is to support an administrator's desire to have an application server instance support one port for “plain” IIOP and another port for IIOP/SSL. The Administration interface lets you configure as many IIOP Listeners as you want, but only two can be enabled (Listener Enabled toggled on) at the same time. If you try to have more than two enabled at once, the Administration interface displays an error.
Does an application server instance have to be running in order to deploy to it?
No, the instance need not be running, but the Admin Server that controls the instance needs to be up and running. If the Admin Server is running, you can either use its Deploy feature in the Administration interface or the asadmin deploy command to deploy a module or an application to an instance regardless of whether or not the instance is up and running.
Does the Admin Server need to be running in order for me to run my application?
No. You can exercise an application server instance without the Admin Server process running. However, to utilize the SNMP capabilities for monitoring the HTTP server, you need to have the Sun ONE Application Server administration process up and running due to its role in interacting with the SNMP master agent.
Can I configure Sun ONE Application Server 7 to run as non-root?
Instructions for setting up administration for a non-root user are contained in the Sun ONE Application Server Installation Guide.
Application DebuggingThis section addresses the following questions:
Can I modify roles in the web or EJB deployment descriptors without restarting the application server?
Changes to application deployment descriptors require a redeploy (not necessarily a restart, if you are using dynamic redeployment).
However, changing application roles dynamically is not really the best approach. The application roles in J2EE are intended as design-time groupings. Instead, look into dynamically changing the mapping of particular users to these roles. You can do this by mapping the J2EE application role to a group (or groups) and altering the membership of these groups as needed.
Upgrade/MigrationThis section addresses the following questions:
Can I upgrade from other versions of Sun ONE Application Server 7 to Enterprise Edition?
Automatic upgrade from other versions of Sun ONE Application Server is not available for Enterprise Edition.
Only one version of Sun ONE Application Server can be on a single machine, so if you have an existing version 7 installation, you must first uninstall your existing version using the uninstallation program, then install Enterprise Edition.
