Troubleshooting: WebSphere Commerce tools fail to start properly

Problem

You are having problems accessing the WebSphere Commerce tools pages.

Solution

If you are having problems accessing the WebSphere Commerce tools pages, such as WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, check the following:

• Ensure that your Web server is running under a user ID that has read permissions to all the files and subdirectories in the WebSphere Commerce enterprise archive (EAR). The full path to the WebSphere Commerce EAR is: WC_profiledir/installedApps/cell_name/WC_ instance_name.ear

  where instance_name is the name of your WebSphere Commerce instance.

  See technote 1240016. This technote contains information on an 403 error when accessing WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
• If you have not rebooted the machine since performing a quick installation, reboot the machine. Some path variables required by WebSphere Commerce might not be set correctly until the machine is rebooted.
• If you have started WebSphere Commerce from the Windows Services panel, ensure that you have waited a few moments after the Services panel indicates that WebSphere Commerce is started before attempting to access WebSphere Commerce in any way. There is a delay between when the Services panel indicates that WebSphere Commerce is started and when WebSphere Commerce is fully initialized and ready to receive requests.
• Before accessing the WebSphere Commerce tools, check the following log files to ensure that WebSphere Commerce is started:
  • WC_profiledir/logs/server1/startServer.log
  • WC_profiledir/logs/server1/SystemOut.log

If the log files indicate that WebSphere Commerce is started, restart your Web server and then attempt to access WebSphere Commerce again.

• Ensure that you have started the Web server after creating a WebSphere Commerce instance.
• Ensure that the system is DNS enabled so that there is a host name and domain present. Pure IP address environments are not supported by WebSphere Commerce.
• Ensure that you can access secure (HTTPS) URLs. If you receive an error when accessing https:// hostname, where hostname is the fully qualified host name of the Web server used by WebSphere Commerce, your SSL certificate might not be installed on your Web server or the certificate might have expired. See your Web server documentation for instructions on installing or updating the SSL certificate.
• Ensure that WebSphere Commerce is started.
• If you are using Microsoft IIS as your Web server, ensure that the authentication methods are set correctly. If the authentication methods are set incorrectly, WebSphere Commerce cannot authenticate the ID when logging on to WebSphere Commerce.
• If you are using a remote Web server, ensure that the full path of the WebSphere Commerce enterprise archive (EAR) is exactly the same on both the Web server and WebSphere Commerce nodes. On Windows operating systems, this includes the drive letter.
  If they are not the same:

  1. Do not remove the existing path of the WebSphere Commerce EAR on the Web server node.
  2. On the Web server, create each directory required to reproduce the path of the WebSphere Commerce EAR as it exists on the WebSphere Commerce node.
  3. Copy the WebSphere Commerce EAR from the WebSphere Commerce node to the new location on the Web server node.

     Important
     Remove any JSP and JAR files from the WC_ instance_name.ear directory (and subdirectories) on the Web server. Only static-content files should be in the WC_ instance_name.ear directory on the Web server.

  4. If you are using Microsoft IIS as the remote Web server, start a command prompt session, switch to the directory into which the addCommerceAliases.js file was copied, for example IISdir. Issue the following command:

     cscript.exe addCommerceAliases.js
     

     This command adds all the necessary aliases to the Microsoft IIS Web server configuration for WebSphere Commerce.

  5. Stop and restart the Web server.