Netware 6.5 Imanager Error 2

[dsimpaired]

Not sure if anyone has seen this but when trying to access Imanager I get

Server error!
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there was an error in a CGI script.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 500

Any suggestions? Servers have 2 gb ram, 2 70gb scsi drives and are brand new.

 

[marvhuffaker]

Is it a Dell? <g>

It's because Tomcat isn't loading. There are actually 4 different places you can go to check this..

Look at this TID, it's badass.

http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?/10090732.htm

You should find the problem if you work through it step by step and don't make assumptions.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[dsimpaired]

The server is actually an Acer and have worked great for the first week. We have been adding users and objects back into the new tree and everything seemed to be going fine until now, will check that in the morning and see, thanks for the info, will let you know what happens.

 

[marvhuffaker]

Your problem really doesn't have anything to do with the brand of server or the hardware.

Do I understand correctly that you redid your whole tree when you upgraded? That shouldn't have been necessary.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[dsimpaired]

Yeah, we redid the whole thing. Luckily it was small enough to just recreate from scratch and the reason was that when we initially installed nw5.1 we were using nds v 7.x and we had some problems and had a device (cd tower) actually modify nds to version 8 and it caused alot of problems and ever since the first installation we had weird nds problems and didn't want to risk bringing anything strange into the new tree. We had a test lab set up and ran the new servers for a month by themselves in a isolated network and we just slowly recreated everything and were able to filter out all off the crap that had been generated over the years. Of course next time I would like to move everything over and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. That brings up a question Marvin, do you participate in the Erate program? Otherwise known as Universal Services? If so I will contact you with some questions and possibly seek a quote for future services.

 

[dsimpaired]

Update...
Marv, we haven't resolved the problem yet. I have our Novell gold partner with their top guy (MCNE, and every other novell certification) who has been working on it for 3 days and still no joy. Tomcat is not loading and after 10 hours on the phone with Novell in Utah the guy sent us a known good directory for Tomcat and we loaded it. Imanager worked for about 2 minutes then went back down. Novell is currently reviewing.....
We have a good one!

 

[dsimpaired]

Fixed... I got tired of waiting on Novell so I started poking around and ended up copying a new host file from another server, along with a new server.xml file in the tomcat/conf directory and restarted the server and Tomcat works and Imanager is back up. The basics were in Marv's TID so he will get the star but if anyone runs across this I have a known good tomcat dir from novell if anyone needs it in the future! It was fun calling Novell back and telling the guy we fixed it ourselves after 10 hours on the phone....

 

[marvhuffaker]

DSIMPAIRED, I just wanted to make a comment on your resolution for this problem.

In that TID, one of the things that it mentions is that Tomcat needs to resolve LOCALHOST to work properly. Unfortunately, that's all it says and doesn't go into much more detail. You have to understand what this means and how to check for it's functionality.

But what this means is that you should be able to run 'PING LOCALHOST' from your server console, and it will ping your localhost address 127.0.0.1 successfully. If it can't do this simple test, Tomcat will fail.

I'm afraid that your tomcat dir is not what fixed the problem. When you said that you copied a HOSTS file from another server and it fixed it, I know exactly where it went bad.

I have seen in many cases, the LOCALHOST entry in the ETC\HOSTS file gets deleted or the IP ADDRESS (127.0.0.1) gets removed from the file. This causes TOMCAT to fail the LOCALHOST Lookup. I don't know when or why this entry gets deleted, but I've seen it on about 10 different servers since NetWare 6.5 was released. I've learned that one of the first things to do after installing it is to edit the hosts files and make sure the LOCALHOST entry is correct.

I'm betting that this is exactly what happened to your hosts file. WHen you put a one from another server, it had a good LOCALHOST line and therefore allowed Tomcat to load.

In the future, if you have problems getting tomcat to load, the first thing to check is that you have a valid HOSTS file. Really, in simplest form, you need two lines:

127.0.0.1 LOCALHOST LOOPBACK (or similar)
x.x.x.x SERVERNAME SERVERNAME.DOMAIN.COM

I feel bad that you spent 10 hours on this problem with Novell support. It's really a 5 minute fix. I hope you didn't pay too much for your Gold partners 'help'. I was going to elaborate when I initially replied but was heading out of town and didn't have time to say more than I did.





Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[dsimpaired]

No problem, the strange thing is we checked the local host line and it appeared correct and the machine would even ping localhost but tomcat would not start. Not sure what fixed the problem as long as it's going. The nice thing is that the install of the servers was the gold partner's job so they were responsible for getting everything working and the support time.

 

[terry712]

did it have a hard return at the end of the file

i know this sounds stupid but it's important to have a hard rtn after the last line in the hosts
if not you can get strange results

 

[dsimpaired]

Great point Terry! I went back and looked and the original host file was created by our vendor and the other servers were created by our staff as we setup the 19 servers in one room. Going back and looking at it the only difference was at the end of the file. The ip info was the same but there were spaces after the last line on our other file compared to the main server.

 

[marvhuffaker]

I've also seen cases where, from the server in EDIT.NLM, the file looks fine. But if you load the file from Notepad, it's got everything mashed into one line with no hard returns. It shouldn't look any different in Notepad than in EDIT.. So if it does look different, obviously something has happened to the hard returns.

I know that since you've already got it fixed, that this is just speculation.. but something worth mentioning.


Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[dsimpaired]

Thanks for the replies and I appreciate the info, as always I get good info here so speculation or just random thoughts, all are appreciated! Thanks again.