Running administrative commands 

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Use administrative commands to run tasks on the server.

About this task

Administrative commands interact with the IBM® Connections applications and their resources through scripts. These scripts use the AdminControl object available in WebSphere® Application Server wsadmin tool to interact with the application servers. Each script uses managed Java™ beans (MBeans) to get and set server administration properties.

Unlike with configuration properties, when you use these commands to change server administration properties, you do not have to check out any files nor restart the server for the changes to take effect. You do, however, need to understand a bit about how to manipulate Java objects. When you perform server operations using the commands, the item, member information, and access level information are represented as hash tables. Many of the commands, in fact, return a vector of hash tables that represent application resources. Commands you can use to perform tasks, such as deleting, archiving, and restoring, all take parameters formatted as vectors of hash tables. You can then pass information in the hash tables to commands that perform server tasks.

When an administrative command is invoked, a SOAP request is made to the IBM Connections application, for example Activities. The number of seconds that the wsadmin client waits for a response to a SOAP request is specified in the com.ibm.SOAP.requestTimeout property specified in the soap.client.props file in the following directory: {WAS_HOME}\profiles\{PROFILE_NAME}\properties. If a command takes longer to complete than the value of the com.ibm.SOAP.requestTimeout property, an error is displayed on the wsadmin console, and any value returned from the invoked method is lost. The command continues to be processed by the application, but the connection that the application had to the client that invoked it is gone. This detail is important to note because some commands take a long time to run. For example, in a system with a large number of Activities, the ActivityService.fetchActivities() command can take a long time to complete. You can monitor the status of these operations by scanning the SystemOut.log file for success and failure messages.

To increase the time interval that passes before a request fails, edit the com.ibm.SOAP.requestTimeout property in the soap.client.props file. This property is a configuration property, so after editing the property, you must restart the server for the change to take effect.

Procedure

1. Start the wsadmin client by completing the following steps:
1. Open a command prompt, and then change to the following directory of the system on which you installed the deployment manager:
   
app_server_root\profiles\<dm_profile_root>\bin

where <app_server_root> is the WebSphere Application Server installation directory and <dm_profile_root> is the Deployment Manager profile directory, typically dmgr01. For example, on Windows:



C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\Dmgr01\bin



Attention: You must run the following command to start the wsadmin client from this specific directory because the Jython files for the product are stored here. If you try to start the client from a different directory, then the execfile() command that you subsequently call to initialize the administration environment for an IBM Connections component does not work correctly.

2. Enter the following command to start the wsadmin client:
   
• AIX or Linux:

./wsadmin.sh -lang jython -user <admin_user_id> -password <admin_password> -port <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port>



• Microsoft Windows:

wsadmin -lang jython -user <admin_user_id> -password <admin_password> -port <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port>



where:

• <admin_user_id> is the user name of a person in the Administrator role on the IBM WebSphere Application Server.
• <admin_password> is the password of the WebSphere Application Server administrator.
• <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port> is the SOAP port for the WebSphere Application Server. The default value of the SOAP port is 8879. If you are using the default port value, you do not need to specify this parameter. If you are not using the default and you do not know the port number, you can look up its value in the WebSphere Application Server Integrated Solution Console. To look up the SOAP port number, perform the following steps:
1. Open the WebSphere Application Server Integrated Solution Console for the deployment manager, and then select System Administration -> Deployment Manager.
2. In the Additional properties section expand Ports, and then look for the SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS port entry to find the port number.
   
For example:

• AIX or Linux:

./wsadmin.sh -lang jython -username primaryAdmin -password p@assword -port 8879



• Microsoft Windows:

wsadmin -lang jython -username primaryAdmin -password p@assword -port 8879



2. Use following command to access the application configuration files:
   

execfile("<application_py_file>")



where <application_py_file> is one of the following:
• IBM Connections-wide: connectionsConfig.py
• Activities: activitiesAdmin.py
• Blogs: blogsAdmin.py
• Bookmarks: dogearAdmin.py
• Communities: communitiesAdmin.py
• Files: filesAdmin.py
• Forums: forumsAdmin.py
• Home Page: homepageAdmin.py
• News: newsAdmin.py
• Profiles: profilesAdmin.py
• Search: searchAdmin.py
• Wikis: wikisAdmin.py
  
If prompted to specify a service to connect to, type 1 to pick the first node in the list. Most commands can run on any node. If the command writes or reads information to or from a file using a local file path, you must pick the node where the file is stored. This information is not used by the wsadmin client when you are making configuration changes.

3. Edit administrative properties and perform administrative tasks using the administrative commands documented in the individual application sections of the product documentation.
   

Parent topic: Administering applications

Related reference
Activities administrative commands
Communities administrative commands
Files administrative commands
Forums administrative commands
News administrative commands
Profiles administrative commands
Wikis administrative commands