Portal DSAME DisplayProfile bizaare behavoir

Question

I was hoping one of you could provide suggestions or confirm that you've seen the particular subtle problem described below.
Having worked with the Sun ONE Portal 6.0 product for a few months now, we have periodically encountered a situation where the Portal's DSAME no longer responds to DisplayProfile changes. I have two machines running exactly the same hw/sw configurations including the Sun Portal 6.0 and our own app code running on top of it. On one machine, I can upload our DisplayProfile and it takes effect immediately with no issues. On the other machine, uploading the DisplayProfile does not take effect. The only difference is the upload process itself on the broken machine seems to take much longer than it used to, a full 5 minutes instead of 10 seconds. Clearly, there's something wrong. I've taken the following steps
1) Shut down the Portal with /opt/SUNWam/bin/amserver stop
2) Shut down LDAP with /usr/ldap/slapd-instance/stop-slapd
3) Confirmed that the processes had gone away with ps -ef | grep 'http-instance'
4) Checked the disk space ( plenty ) with df -k
5) Cycled the logs in /var/opt/SUNWam/logs/desktop.debug and /opt/SUNWam/servers/instance/logs/error
6) Started everything with /opt/SUNWam/bin/amserver /start
This doesn't fix the problem. Next, I went to the admin GUI and clicked on the "Channel and Container management" link and then drilled down to our JSPTabContainer based container. The channels that show up in the desktop( and which should have been removed with the last DisplayProfile upload ) do not show up in the edit box that shows all the channels for a container( correctly ).
Next, I've tried uploading an original, clean copy of the DSAME DisplayProfile that I saved off imediately upon installing the product. This did not have the desired effect of reinitializing the desktop.
It seems like DSAME is getting "stuck" and there's a disconnect between what the Portal admin GUI is showing us and what actually shows up on the desktop. It seems like there's no way to shake it loose, either and the only solution I have is to reinstall the Portal ( this resets DSAME ). Does anyone know how to reset DSAME without reinstalling the Portal?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Hi,
May be I am completely off the topic, but I can give you
possible explanations, why sometimes your changes in
DSAME admin are not getting propagated to the portal:
1) The problem is JSP compilation date/time:
Just assume you are running a channel and you are
updating its jsp(older timestamp) and a property.
- JSP will not get compiled. You will not see your
changes. But if you modify it - it will immediately
show your changes on the desktop...
2) In another case, where I had to compare two installations
I couldn't find any differences until I compared the
portal installation logfiles located in /var/sadm/install/logs/
and found(look for ERROR) that one of them failed to install
required LDAP and DSAME patches.
These are two "bizaare behavoir" examples -
I am sure there are more!...
Cheers,
Alex :-)