Taking Notez – Island Pond Consulting

When ever I advise someone on applying packs and fixes to IBM WebSphere Portal I ALWAYS say they must read every line of the documentation and follow each of the linked documents until they have determined the precise requirements for their environment. Of course sometimes I fail to follow my own advise.

Such was the case today. I am installing a new development environment for our dev team. Because I feel it is imperative that the platform for which they are developing is current, I decided to apply the most current and recommended fix packs and fixes. I scanned the very familiar text of the relevant pages and quickly surmised that the process was the same as before. 

One recent change to the site proved to be a bonus. There is now a wizard interface to guide the selection of the recommended packs and fixes. I dutifully downloaded the artifacts for the WebSphere Application Server, the WebSphere Portal Server, and the required update installers for each.

Next, as usual, I installed the WAS fix using it’s installer and then, using the HealthChecker tool for the portal, I confirmed that the platform was ready for the portal pack and fixes. The install of the fix pack failed. It was a message not unfamiliar to me. In a nutshell, the log showed that the user did not have permission to extract the archive for WP_PTF_7002. Well, I thought, maybe I should log on to Windows as the portal admin. While it is not normal to see this error on Windows (very common on Linux and Unix) I assumed that there were indeed some ownership issues on Windows Server 2008 that I had overlooked.

The operative words in this monolog are ‘quickly’, ‘surmised’, and ‘assumed’. After making ownership changes to the entire folder structure I tried again; I failed. I dove into the DeveloperWorks forums. I scanned the web. No luck seemed to be coming my way. I almost reached out to a friend at IBM to ask if he had seen this problem. And then I was struck by a thought, “What if I contact my friend and he points out something in the documentation I had overlooked.”

With reluctance only marginally overcome by the potential of real embarrassment I read (notice I did not say re-read) the docs. And there it was: a simple requirement to provide values to WASPassword and PortalAdminPWD in the wkplc.properties file. While I am inclined to quibble about the necessity or even the desirability of this, I have to admit that it was a simple overlooked requirement that cost me an hour of frustration.

Lesson learned: surmise less and read more.