Common Boot-up Issue

It is fairly common to hear OpenAM administrators complaining of reaching the Configuration Options page after a restart of OpenAM server, even though they are pretty sure OpenAM was previously successfully configured.

Well, sometimes, I still do hit the same irritating page! Just like today. :) What happened?


A look at the web container's log (in my case, Tomcat 7) will reveal why:


INFO: Initiating Jersey application, version 'Jersey: 1.1.1-ea-SNAPSHOT 07/13/2009 07:22 AM'
checkConfigProperties :com.sun.identity.setup.ConfiguratorException: /home/azlabs/.openssocfg/AMConfig_home_azlabs_opt_am1_webapps_openam_ (No such file or directory)


A history of what I have executed in the shell prompt also confirm what's the real cause:


[azlabs@idp ~]$ history

  902  opt/am1/bin/shutdown.sh
  904  opt/am1/bin/startup.sh
  907  cat .openssocfg/AMConfig_home_azlabs_opt_tomcat-7.0.34-am1_webapps_openam_
  910  opt/am1/bin/shutdown.sh
  911  /home/azlabs/opt/tomcat-7.0.34-am1/bin/startup.sh
 

When OpenAM was initially configured, the Tomcat was started up via "opt/tomcat-7.0.34-am1/...". The symbolic link "am1" (which points to tomcat-7.0.34-am1) was later created.

As such, if Tomcat is now started via "opt/am1/...", it will attempt to look for a file "AMConfig_home_azlabs_opt_am1_webapps_openam_" in the .openssocfg directory (which obviously will fail since there is no such file).

And so, the famous "Configuration Options" page will appear.


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