Posts tagged: websphere

Away from the announcement of IBM XWork Server and Notes/Domino 8.5.3, there are a raft of other software announcements from IBM today.  This one caught my eye:

Three new bundled offerings to accelerate development and deliver high quality, innovative applications for IBM WebSphere Application Server V7.0 or V8.0:

• IBM WebSphere Application Server – Tools Edition
• IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment – Tools Edition
• IBM WebSphere Application Server for Developers – Tools Edition for Eclipse

The first two enterprise bundles combine WebSphere Application Server (V7.0 or V8.0) with the number-one rated Rational

The BBC interviews Donald Ferguson, now of CA Technologies:

What’s the biggest technology mistake you ever made – either at work or in your own life?

When I was at IBM, I started a product called Websphere [which helps companies to operate and integrate business applications across multiple computing platforms].

Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control … I tried to build something like a mainframe, a system that was capable of doing anything, that would be able to do what might be needed in five years.

I call it the endgame fallacy. It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it.

Because we were IBM, we survived it, but if we’d been a start-up, we’d have gone to the wall.

Ouch! Now, I’m sure that Mr. Ferguson probably has an axe to grind given his current position, but the article does have some good things to say:

But the biggest problem is the complexity of IT. If you look at any IT in business, it is so complex it hinders the ability to be agile and efficient. Throughout the history of IT we all have said that we will make it simpler by adding more things to it, but that makes it more and more complex.

IT departments spend 75% to 85% of their budgets just to keep existing IT environments running; that leaves little capacity for innovation.

So we have to simplify IT, but that’s really hard. I have actually brought in people who have experience designing user interfaces for consumer software, to get this knowledge into the design of our new products.

Worth a read…

[Just seen that Ben Poole posted this last week…]

Another WebSphere Application Server (WAS) tip…

If you, ahem, forget your WAS Admin password, then you will be locked out from your Websphere console, and won’t be able to stop the WAS server.  A bit of a bind I can tell you…

Well, fortunately this can be rectified as long as you have access to your WAS server’s OS platform:

To disable global security, edit the server security.xml file. The security.xml file can be found in the {mountpoint}/AppServer/config/cells/ directory.

To disable global security, edit the security.xml. Search for the line that begins with the following tag: security:Security. In that line search for enabled. The word following enabled is true. Change it to false. Save the file. Restart the server. Global security is now disabled.

Now of course I wouldn’t be silly enough to ever need to do this, right!?!

If you are running on Windows, and WAS 6.x refuses to start after a reboot, giving a Windows 7204 event and a message similar to:

Timed out waiting for service to respond to command, after 60 seconds

then check the user the service is running under.  On certain systems (particularly if IPv6 is installed I think) running as a “Local System Account” doesn’t give the application enough rights to access all the resources it needs.  Change this to a system admin in the AD, and it seems to start up ok.

This occurred during an install of Lotus Connections 2.0, so hopefully this will help someone (or indeed me in 6 months when I’ve forgotten how I fixed it!)…