21 Steps to recover a corrupted WebSphere Portal Server - Part 1

What would you do if you encounter any of this issues on your Portal Environment ?

1. Previous day, your portal is working fine but the next day, suddenly nobody can login


2. You manage to fix the login but another issue arises. Your WCM Content cannot be seen by both normal users, WPSADMINS group and the WPSADMIN himself


3. PDM Content also cannot be seen


4. All applications shows "Application Error, please contact your system administrator for more details"


5. All the pages that you've created magically is gone


6. To make the matters worst, the site will be launch on that same week


7. However, the database still contains the information you need.

These happened to me and my team, and we happily recovered the system. Well after hard work and some combination of advance technique.

This is the summary of the events. I will tell you on the next post how we manage to recover the system.

Portal Version : Non-clustered Websphere Portal 6.0 Express with fixpack 6.0.1.3 integrated with DB2 and Active Directory. SSO via Credential vault to external systems.

1. August 7, 2008 - We did some tuning on Portal in preparation for the launch. We left the clients premises at 5:30 and the portal is still working fine.
   
2. August 8, 2008 - Customer reported that she cannot login to Portal. My colleague tested and it indeed cannot login I was in a meeting that time and have to rush to my clients place
   
3. Still on same day - We investigated and we found out that the error we are receiving is Account Locked error. We tested the account using Softerra and all the accounts work. However in Portal, all accounts are locked.
   
4. Still on the same day - We decided to redo the security by running a WPSConfig disable-security and WPSConfig enable-security-ldap
   
5. Still on the same day - After re-doing the security, all accounts worked but lo and behold, data and contents are missing. Furthermore, all applications are not accessible (error) and , the most painful thing, no pages are accessible, even the Portal Administrator Page
   
6. Still on the same day - We tried to access via the URL mapping, but no pages are accessible.
   
7. Still on the same day - We investigated the database and all database are available.
   
8. Still on the same day - We decided to re-do the enabling of security but it didnt work. (silly yes, but when your in this state, you will do whatever to recover anything.)
   
9. We checked with the client if there is a backup but, sadly, no backup is available. Jia lat. That's it.. or is it ?
   
10. Hmmmm... up to the next post. We will show you how we manage to recover everything...