Chapter 4 Administration Server And Nodes

• Running Administration Server As Non-Root

• Pulling Configuration Changes to the Administration Server

• Making Changes to server.policy File

Running Administration Server As Non-Root

Problem: Unable to bind at port <port_number>.

The administration server and the administration nodes should be run by the same user id in Unix. This is because of the following reason:

1. If the instances are running as part of the root process, the Administration Server will not have sufficient permissions to modify the instance's configuration files, if it is not running as part of the root process.

So for the administration server to perform its job of maintaining the server instances, it either needs to be part of the root process or at least the same user as that of the server instance. However in Solaris 10, you don't need to run the Administration Server as root to bind to port 80 (or < 1024). Execute the following commands:

# su
# /usr/sbin/usermod -K defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr webservd

Pulling Configuration Changes to the Administration Server

Whenever you make manual changes to the configuration, you should replicate the changes back into the Administration server repository as follows:

1. Manually edit server instance's configuration files as you would do with the earlier version of Web Server.

2. Start the Web Server 7.0 Administration Server. See the Administrator's Guide.

3. For pulling the changes back to the Administration Server repository, execute the following command.

   wadm> pull-config --user=admin --config=CONFIG_NAME

The operation may take some time depending on the configuration.

Always use the Administration Console or the wadm CLI to edit the settings.

Making Changes to server.policy File

If you are deploying your website containing Java web applications and would like to enable security manager within the web container, then you will need to edit the server instance's server.policy file. In this scenario, Administration Server does not provide a direct command line interface or GUI to edit this server.policy file. But you can still perform the steps as mentioned in the previous section to make any manual edit to the server.policy file.

Deployment Pending Message in Administration Console

When I make changes to a configuration from the GUI, I see a deployment pending message. What does it mean?

The deployment pending message indicates that there are changes to the configuration that are saved into the administration server's configuration store. You need to click the Deploy button to save these changes to the instances.

Do I Need to Save or Deploy?

What is the difference between the Save and Deploy buttons that shows up on every page in the Administration Console within a configuration?

If you click on Save, then the changes are saved only in the configuration store. When you click the Deploy button, the changes will be saved to the instances.

Manually Editing Configuration Files

Can I make manual edits to my configuration files? Will these be reflected in the CLI and GUI?

If you need to make manual changes to the configuration files, make the changes within the configuration store. These changes will be reflected in the CLI and GUI and can be deployed using the deploy-config command or by clicking on Deploy button in the GUI. But if you make changes directly in the instance, the Administration Console will show up a warning stating that there are manual modifications to the configuration files and you need to either overwrite these changes with the configuration in the configuration store or else get these changes back into the configuration store overwriting the existing configuration changes.

Always use the Administration Console or the wadm CLI to edit the settings.

deploy-config Command Fails

Sometimes the deploy-config fails saying that a server restart is needed. Why?

When deploy-config is invoked, the configuration changes in the configuration store are propagated to the instances and the running servers are re-configured so that the configuration changes are picked up. But certain changes cannot be applied dynamically and need a server restart. You will hence need to run a restart-instance command in order to restart the server instances.

Where Can I Find wadm CLI?

Where can I find the CLI for Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 administration?

The administration CLI is located at install-root/bin/wadm. To use the CLI, you need to know:

• Administration server hostname (default is localhost).

• SSL port for the administration server (default is 8989).

• Administration server user name (default is admin).

• Administration server password.

Administration server needs to be running in order to use the CLI. You can start the server by running install-root/admin-server/bin/startserv.

If you are using wadm CLI on the same machine where the Administration Server is installed, then you do not need to know the Administration Server's port number. You are required to know the port number only if you have configured Administration Node and need to use wadm CLI to connect to a remote Administration Server.