Troubleshooting Port conflict in Websphere Portal

Today, I found this strange error while starting "Websphere application server" and "Websphere Poral server" on my box which already running one more instance of WPS. I was able to start only one process at a time but not both. I got this error while starting the server1 when websphere Portal is already started.

WsServerImpl E WSVR0009E: Error occurred during startup
com.ibm.ws.exception.RuntimeError: com.ibm.ws.exception.RuntimeError: org.omg.CORBA.INTERNAL: CREATE_LISTENER_FAILED_4 vmcid: 0x49421000 minor code: 56 completed: No

This was due to port conflict between processes "server1" and "Websphere Portal". To resolve this perform the following steps.

1. Stop all WebSphere processes: Application Servers, nodeagents, and the deployment manager.
2. View all ports in use on the operating system by issuing a netstat -a command. Make note of any ports in use.
3. Open the serverindex.xml file for your server. You can find it in the directory /config/cells//nodes//serverindex.xml
4. Check this file for any of the port conflict with the result in step-2.
5. Resolve the port conflict by editing the serverindex.xml and change the conflicting port number to one that is not in use, then restart all the WebSphere processes.

Websphere Portal isses with IE8

In my current project, I got this request from our client that they need portal application to be tested on IE8. Sounds pretty easy to me at the first glance but to my surprise I found few really interesting issues and their solution. So I thought let me share it with other community members as well.

Main issues which I dealt with were regarding java script used in themes/skins as well as portlet applications. One major issue was with Portlet context menu not displaying at all in IE8. Also the pagination was broken in IE8 as well. Our developer has spent substantial time on fixing this but eventually I found this out of the wood solution for that.. :)

1. In Websphere Portal navigate to Administrative portlets and click on Supported Clients.


2. You can see the "Manage Clients" Portlet. Click on Add New Client link
3. Fill up the necessary details about IE8 as shown below.



4. Save it and you are done.

Here are few more options that you can provide in the form above.
User Agent: .*MSIE 8.0.*
Markup: html
Markup version: ie
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Model: Internet Explorer
Version: 8.0
Capabilities: CACHE_VARY,
HTML_2_0,
HTML_JAVA,
HTML_CSS,
HTML_FRAME,
HTML_TABLE,
HTML_4_0,
HTML_3_2,
HTML_JAVASCRIPT,
HTML_3_0,
HTML_NESTED_TABLE,
FRAGMENT_IDENTIFIER,
HTML_IFRAME

Hope you like this hidden feature of IBM. :)

Sample virtual member manager plug-in for WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 and above

I got this very nice article on virtual member manager plug-in for WAS 6.1 and above while browsing through developerworks site. The plug-in manager provides a framework that enables you to write extensions to virtual member manager API to consume a variety of services that can be added in the future

You can find complete article here.