Verifying the database

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.

Verify that the WebSphere Portal Express application server is running by opening WebSphere Portal Express in a browser: http://hostname.example.com:10040/wps/portal, where hostname.example.com is the fully qualified host name of the machine where WebSphere Portal is running and 10040 is the default transport port that is created by WebSphere Application Server.

There might be an error if any of the following conditions exist.

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

Verifying database connections