A Portal to a Portal

Hmmm, just hit a wierd little issue during a WebSphere Portal workshop, where some of the attendees weren't seeing the user ID and password fields on the login page ( http://hostname.domain.com/wps/portal ). In addition, the Sign Up link didn't do owt.

We're using VMware images which have worked perfectly in the past but ... for some reason, they didn't work today.

After the normal stop/start processes failed to resolve it, I tried deleting the compiled page ( _Home.class ) from the temporary page cache.

As an example, on my Linux box, that's here: -

/opt/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/wp_profile/temp/starg/WebSphere_Portal/wps/wps.war/screens/html

Having restarted Portal again, all was well. The login page recompiled ( regenerating _home.class ) and we were in like Flynn.

Then saw a similar/related problem where the New Page button didn't return us back to Manage Pages. Again, the solution was to clear the cache/compiled pages. I took the big bang approach and deleted everything under the temp directory: -

/opt/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/wp_profile/temp

Again, a restart and a wait for page recompilation, and all was well.

Not sure what happened - could've been due to network address/hostname changes or something far far wierder.

Wierd but true .......