Chapter 6   Troubleshooting


This chapter discusses problems you may encounter with your system and provides possible solutions. Details on some of these situations can be found in the Chapter 3 "Configuring Your System," and Chapter 4 "Performance Tuning and Monitoring."

This chapter addresses the following (alphabetized) error situations:

• Application server and web server would not start.

• Display profile contained bad data.

• E-mail notifications are not sent out.

• kjs process crashes under load.

• LDAP error occur before login.

• New users are not able to log in.

• No available http sessions.

• ORA-29861: domain index is marked LOADING/FAILED/UNUSABLE.

• Oracle exceptions caused by Job Scheduler.

• Oracle JDBC exceptions occur.

• Page flow doesn't correspond with actions.

• Slow login time.

• Slow performance.

• Slow response time.

Use the log files and debugging messages when trying to resolve issues within iPlanet Market Maker.

Application server and web server would not start.

The LDAP server in which the iPlanet Application Server and iPlanet WebServer plug-in are registered has not started.

Solution:

Before starting the iPlanet WebServer or iPlanet Application Server, start the LDAP where they are registered.

Display profile contained bad data.

On invoking the gateway JSP file (imm.jsp by default), this error message occurs.

This could be caused by the following:

• Display profile load didn't go through or was not done as a part of the install.

• The Oracle database is not up or the iPlanet Market Maker hosts cannot connect to Oracle database due to improper settings in the VortexConfiguration.properties.

• There was an attempt to reload community from scratch overwriting the previous community load without running the display profile load again.

  Solution:

  • Run the install.bash script from the iMM_HOME/tools/etc directory if this has not been done after the LDAP/Oracle loading with the Installer.

  • Check to see if the Oracle instance is up and running and if the settings in the iPlanet Market Maker hosts to connect to Oracle database are made correctly.

  • If you are reloading community data, for any reason, overwriting the existing community data, ensure that the install.bash is run again. This must be a reload from an LDIF which ensures creation of new guids for all loaded users. This doesn't apply to restorations of community from backups because the GUIDs from the backup are the same as the GUIDs in the database.

E-mail notifications are not sent out.

There is an incorrect SMTP host setting in the file VortexConfiguration.properties file.

Solution:

Ensure that the SMTP host setting specified during installation in the file VortexConfiguration.properties is correctly specified.

kjs process crashes under load.

JVM is running out of memory.

Solution:

Adjust the maximum heap size of the JVM in the KJS script as mentioned in the performance tuning section. You can modify this in the KJS under the iPlanet Application Server configuration directory.

LDAP error occur before login.

Before logging in for the first time, while accessing the login page, LDAP exceptions are thrown.

The iPlanet Market Maker instance is not connecting to LDAP properly.

Solution:

• Check the settings for LDAP in the userxconfig.properties file.Look for the following keys:

  ldaphost: localhost

  ldapport: 389

• Check the settings for LDAP in the VortexConfiguration.properties file. Look for the following keys:

  #CFG_LDAP_READ_USER
  *10=f2zgvsFyajQORAFrsZXexKebDLWW3cAk
  #CFG_LDAP_READ_PASSWORD
  *11=iT2NSQTfIUM8zRefAD7VjQ==
  #CFG_LDAP_WRITE_USER
  *12=f2zgvsFyajQORAFrsZXexKebDLWW3cAk
  #CFG_LDAP_WRITE_PASSWORD
  *13=iT2NSQTfIUM8zRefAD7VjQ==

Make the appropriate adjustments to the settings for your configuration.

Login fails for interoperability.

If your system is configured for interoperability with iPlanet Market Maker and iPlanet BuyerXpert located on separate machines, login will fail if the system time on both machines is not the same.

Solution:

Set the same system time on both machines.

New users are not able to log in.

As the number of users logged in increases beyond a point, new users are not able to log in; an Oracle exception occurs. There are two possible problems.

• The job scheduler is not running.

  Solution:

  The job scheduler should be running for the e-mail notifications to be sent out. Ensure that it is up and running in its JVM.

• The database connection pool has reached the maximum limit and so is unable to create more connections for the users.

  Solution:

  Change the database connection pool maximum size by modifying the properties in the VortexConfiguration.properties file.

No available http sessions.

Under high load conditions, the web server error log indicates that we have run out of available http sessions.

The maximum number of valid sessions allowed by default in iPlanet WebServer is 1000; the inactive session time out on the server is 30 minutes. If more than 1000 users demand valid sessions from the same iPlanet Market Maker host in a total duration of 30 minutes, you might see the server return an internal server error with the status code of 500, which causes the web server error log to indicate that you have run out of available sessions.

Solution:

Change the maxSessions setting in the <iPlanet-HOME>/webserver-instance/config/context.properties file to increase the number of maximum allowed valid sessions and/or reduce the session time-out on iPlanet WebServer.

ORA-29861: domain index is marked LOADING/FAILED/UNUSABLE.

The web page throws this Oracle error message. This is an Oracle interMedia index error on the column value of the table cat_attr, which means that interMedia index CAT_ATR_VALUE_TXT1 is in a state of loading. (Also, check Oracle error messages document).

Solution:

The database administrator must drop the index with the force option and rebuild when you get this error. Issue the following commands to fix:

1. Log into SQLPLUS as cat user.

2. Issue the following using the force option:

   "drop index CAT_ATR_VALUE_TXT1 FORCE;"

3. Recreate the index:

   "create index CAT_ATR_VALUE_TXT1 on CAT_ATTR (VALUE) indextype is ctxsys.context;"

Oracle exceptions caused by Job Scheduler.

After stopping and restarting Oracle, there are exceptions thrown from Oracle reads by the job scheduler.

Solution:

The job scheduler process needs to be stopped and restarted every time Oracle is shut down and restarted.

Oracle JDBC exceptions occur.

Before logging in for the first time, while accessing the login page, Oracle JDBC exceptions are thrown.

iPlanet Market Maker is not connecting to the Oracle database properly.

Solution:

Check the settings for the Oracle database in the VortexConfiguration.properties file. Look for the following keys:

#CFG_DATABASE_DRIVER
# - Specifies the JDBC driver file.
1=oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver

#CFG_DATABASE_URL
# - Specifies the database connectivity URL
#Type4 -- 2=jdbc:oracle:oci8:@vortex

#CFG_DATABASE_USER
# - Specifies the database user.
*3=T8bQpW4AQTw=

#CFG_DATABASE_PASSWORD
# - Specifies the database password.
*4=T8bQpW4AQTw=

Make the appropriate adjustments to the settings for your configuration.

Page flow doesn't correspond with actions.

In a load-balanced environment, the page flow does not seem to correspond with the actions you follow.

Resonate is not set up correctly to work with the iPlanet Market Maker software.

Solution:

Verify that you have correctly installed Resonate. Important aspects of the installation include:

• Setting up the nodes that represent the iPlanet Market Maker servers that the load will be balanced on.

• Configuring the VIP (Virtual IP) to an IP address in the subnet that is not being used.

• Configuring Resonate for HTTP load balancing to balance among all the iPlanet Market Maker servers on port 80.

• Configuring Resonate for cookie persistence based on the name of the cookie being returned from the server.

• Starting Resonate.

• Configuring each iPlanet WebServer with the iPlanet Market Maker installation to have appropriate (and unique) cookie names for the session.

• Restarting each iPlanet WebServer installation so that the cookie name settings take effect.

Slow login time.

In the display profile of the user, the In-box channel can be set to display the number of emails in the Shared In-box on the portal page every time the user logs in. If this is set, the Shared In-box should be cleaned regularly. If the In-box is not cleaned regularly and if it holds a large number of emails, it could result in longer logging time.

Solution

Delete the emails from the Inbox regularly or remove it as a channel from the users' display profile for the portal page.

Slow performance.

Very slow performance (hours instead of minutes) may occur when performing attribute normalization (an optional operation) for a catalog.

Solution:

Verify that every attribute mentioned in the incoming catalog is contained in any of the translation tables being used. This applies to every version of the iPlanet Market Maker software.

Slow response time.

Exceptionally long response times occur when users try to log in after deployment.

Could be caused by the following:

• Missing indexes in the LDAP settings.

• The community size has exceeded the ALL_IDS_THRESHOLD setting.

• LDAP connection pool is undersized.

  Solution:

  • Look for any notes=U entries in the LDAP access logs. These entries indicate that there could be a missing index in LDAP for a particular search attribute. For the notes=U entry, identify the attributes in the LDAP search filter and check the slapd.ldbm.conf file in LDAP config settings to see if there is any attribute on which the index has not been created.

  • If the community size exceeds the ALL_IDS_THRESHOLD setting, you can expect to see notes=U entries in the LDAP access logs with large etimes (elapsed times). The only solution presently is to adjust the ALL_IDS_THRESHOLD upward.

  • Look for the sizing of the LDAP connection pool in the userxconfig.properties file. The LDAP clients might be running out of free LDAP connections in the LDAP connection pool. Ensure that, on each iPlanet Market Maker host, the connection pool is set to have minimum and maximum settings of 150 and 300 respectively. These are comfortable settings for expected loads.