The Connection Server

Every now and then my job gets so boring that I feel like a robot. Today was one of those days, so I decided I needed a laugh and went in search of funny quotes relevant to working as a corporate sys admin... Hopefully there's one or two new ones for readers. The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on. -Robert Bloch UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. -Dennis Ritchie Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. -Plant Manager, Delco Corporation Some things Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there's Google. -Unknown To err is human... to really foul up requires the root password. -Unknown Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots... -Rich Cook I had a fortune cookie the other day and it said: 'Outlook not so good'....

I remember the first time I had to work out why WebLogic wouldn't run as a service. It was a frustrating experience. There were no error messages. No Windows error dialog. No console output. How do you troubleshoot something like this??!! This short article will show you. For simplicity I'll talk about the node manager, but the same principles apply for running an admin or managed server as a service. First Steps First, you still have your server logs. Sure the console output is better, but it's a starting point. Check this log for errors and especially take note of the start up variables such as PATH and CLASSPATH. If the server log isn't being created, that tells you WebLogic probably isn't even being started. (Check that you have a license file if you haven't already.) Ok, so the logs were no help. The next step is to look at how the service is trying to start WebLogic. When you install WebLogic as a service, you're really setting up beasvc.exe as the ser...