Verifying database connections

After WebSphere Portal Express is configured to work with your database, test the database connection to ensure that it operates correctly.

Note: Do not run the test connection in the IBM^® WebSphere^® Application Server Administrative Console.

You can verify the connection from a browser or from a command line.

To verify that WebSphere Portal Express is running from a browser, open the portal in a Web browser: http://hostname.yourco.com:port_number/wps/portal, where hostname.yourco.com is the fully qualified host name of the machine where WebSphere Portal Express is running and port_number is the transport port that is created by IBM WebSphere Application Server.

There may be an error if any of the following conditions appear.

When trying to access the portal you get a 503 error.
If you had any locale problems with your database, you could see invalid characters, such as ????, after logging in. This may happen if the character set of the database is not UTF-8 compliant.
If something went wrong with the data that was transferred, you may not be able to login. WebSphere Portal Express will indicate you entered an invalid user ID and password even though you know it is valid.

Verify the connection from a command line by completing the following steps:

Start a 5250 session on the local machine where WebSphere Portal Express is installed.
Enter STRQSH or SBMJOB CMD(STRQSH) on the command line. Use SBMJOB to submit the Qshell script as a batch job to run in *BASE pool when *INTERACT pool does not have 1GB or more of allocated memory.
For WebSphere Portal Express on WebSphere Application Server (UserData path), enter the following on the command line: cd wp_profile_root/ConfigEngine.
Enter the following command: ConfigEngine.sh -profileName profile_root validate-database-connection-schema_name -DDbPassword=password
where profile_root is the name of your WebSphere Application Server profile, schema_name is the name of your database schema, and password is the database administrator password.

For security reasons, you should not leave passwords in the wkplc_comp.properties file. Edit the file prior to running a configuration task and insert the passwords that are needed for that task. After the task has run, delete all passwords from the file.

Alternatively, you can specify the password on the command line rather than update the wkplc_comp.properties file. For example: ConfigEngine.sh -profileName profile_root -DPortalAdminPwd=password validate-wps-admin-login

When installing WebSphere Portal Express, the passwords in the wkplc_comp.properties file are automatically removed after configuration.