User search filter for Active Directory user repository in WebSphere Portal

This is a very trivial entry for most people in the know, but not so trivial for others. If you are configuring WebSphere Portal to use either Active Directory or Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) as the LDAP user registry, then it is critical to set up the user search filter correctly or else you are going to run into issues with users not being able to authenticate. We have a client for whom we are using ADAM wherein ADAM is used for the Portal LDAP and it syncs up with Active Directory. Well, my portal administrator who is working on that project ran into a problem with Portal users not being able to authenticate successfully.

How do you change the LDAP server name for a WebSphere Portal v6 server?

Today one of the portal administrators in my team was trying to reconfigure the LDAP server being used by an existing WebSphere Portal v6 install. The specific reconfiguration that he was doing was extremely simple – he was replacing one LDAP server with another identically configured LDAP server – so the only change was the name of the LDAP server. We were able to perform this change without disabling/re-enabling security in WebSphere Portal.

Deploying WebSphere Portal Document Manager (PDM) on a guest page

Recently our team needed to deploy the Portal Document Manager (PDM) portlet on a public WebSphere Portal page for guest user access. It turned out that this was not as trivial as expected if you don’t know what actions are required and there is nothing on IBM’s site documenting the steps involved in getting the document manager portlet to work for guest users. I figured I would capture the key steps here in case you need to do the same and are having a hard time with this task!

How do you add a “create a new sibling page” link in a WebSphere Portal v6 theme?

This blog entry is straight plagiarism! I got this from Keith (a co-worker) and thought that it was pretty cool and decided to share his work. Keith has been doing some cool stuff for an Xtivia client and some of this work has been around some serious theme customizations. One of those theme customizations that he had to figure out was how to add a persistent link to the theme which will add a new page at the currently selected level of navigation in WPE. This is useful for many situations including where you have a tab based navigation, you can have a “New page” tab where users can simply specify a page name and add a new tab at the same level as the other tabs. It goes like this:

Missing log4j log files with DailyRollingFileAppender when they should roll over?

Yes, I am back with a blog entry after quite a gap here! I have been knocked out sick for 5 weeks now and I am sick of being sick! Better now and hoping to be back at a 100% soon. Enough excuses – onto the subject of this blog entry. We use Log4j’s DailyRollingFileAppender in a WebSphere Portal environment to generate daily log files for various custom portlets that we have deployed. This worked just fine on some WPE v6 test servers with multiple portlets logging to the same log file, and the daily rollover occurring every midnight. However, on some other WPE v6 test servers running the exact same applications, while logging did work the daily rollover did not. Instead of us having multiple log files with date timestamps in their names, we would only have today’s log file – the previous log files would simply disappear! This issue results from the fact that the DailyRollingFileAppender (DRFA) tries to rename the log file during rollover. However, when the rename fails, it ends up overwriting the log file, hence losing information. On checking the application server’s SystemErr.log, we found an error each midnight similar to -

log4j:ERROR Failed to rename [logfilename] to logfilename.2008.01.11].

This appears to be a fairly common issue with log4j 1.2.x in Java application servers running on Windows. While there is no good resolution for this issue there is a workaround that works pretty well.