A Portal to a Portal

Having spent much of last week and the weekend installing the shiny new code, I spent two most excellent days with a client, helping them get up-to-speed with WebSphere Portal Express 6.1.

That was Monday/Tuesday. Here I am again on Wednesday doing the same thing, but with a different client in a different part of the country.

It's Windows Server 2003 which has, in the past, been my nemesis, but I'm not going to let it beat me. Am checking all the usual things: -

• Nothing listening on the port range 100xx ( WebSphere ) and 50000 ( DB2 UDB )
  
  Good thing I checked; Backup Exec Remote Agent for Windows Systems was running on 10000
  
  
• Signed on as a local administrator
  
  
• Data Execution Prevention (DEP) not getting in the way
  
  Again, I know that caused problems with a Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal installation in the past
  
  
• Using MSTSC /CONSOLE to start the RDP session
  
  This gives one more console-like access than the normal MSTSC interface; I know that's caused problems for others in the past
  
  
• Fully qualified hostname
  
  Belt and braces; this is what I've always done, so I'll always do it
  
  
• No need for hosts file updates
  
  
• "Real" IP address
  
  
• Password policy clearly understood
  
  I created a "dummy" account with the same password that I'm going to use for the portal installation just to check that it didn't breach the local/site password rules
  
  
• Enough RAM in the server
  
  Only have 1 GB - need 2 GB as a minimum; being fixed as I write ... I now have a different server with 2.5 GB

And off we go ....