Recently, we were faced with a situation where a Weblogic admin server was failing to start, but was leaving very little info in the logs to point to the reason why, so we had to dig a bit deeper to find the cause.

This is the error message as it appeared in the weblogic log:

Read more… Troubleshooting Weblogic Authentication with the Truss Command

A problem you may have come across is your Weblogic or Websphere server complaining that the Entrust SSL certificate is missing the field Basic Constraints.  It may have shown up as Java exceptions, or errors with messages about certificate chains received from a website missing the basic constraints extension.  Here are some examples:

[Security:090548]The certificate chain received from www.example.com - 10.100.10.100 contained a V3 CA certificate which was missing the basic constraints extension

Read more… Weblogic and Websphere Missing “Basic Constraints” with Entrust SSL Certificates

Using wget and the Tomcat manager, you can script remote tomcat deploys, undeploys, starts, stops, and status.

First, make sure the Tomcat manager is installed and running:

Read more… Command-line Tomcat server control with wget and the Tomcat manager

To trace a java thread from a thread dump to the corresponding thread on Solaris 10, you can find the LWP using pstack by converting the NID (which corresponds to the LWP ID on Solaris) and matching it up in the pstack output, or by finding the TID listed in the pstack output.
Read more… Matching java thread nid & tid to solaris 10 threads using ‘pstack’

I got a wild hair and have been trying to determine the best way to go about parsing java thread dumps with python. After a few failed attempts, I came across the pyparsing python module. Pyparsing is a fairly simple to use (considering what it is doing) parsing module, that makes quick work out of cryptic log files…

I was trying to parse a typical java thread dump, like this one, “web81.prod.dump”:

Read more… Parsing log files with python and the pyparsing module