Administrative console
To test our application server is functioning correctly, we will log in to the administration console. The administration console is a web application, which is used to configure the WebSphere Application Server. You can use it to perform tasks such as:
- Add, delete, start, and stop application servers
- Deploy new applications to a server
- Start and stop existing applications, and modify certain configurations
- Add, delete, and edit resource providers
- Configure security, including access to the administrative console
- Details are covered in Chapter 4,Security.
- Collect data for performance and troubleshooting purposes
- Details are covered in Chapter 8,Monitoring and Tuning.
Currently, the application server is in a stopped state. Before we can log in to the admin console, we must start the newly created application server. To start the application server, we can use a special command script. Command scripts are found in the<was_profile_root> directory.
There are two scripts that we will use often throughout the book to start and stop WAS.
To start our application server, we will use the startServer.sh command as follows:
<was_profile_root>/bin/startServer.sh server01
Once you run the script, you will see the following output in the Linux SSH session or command-line console if you are using Windows:
ADMU0116I: Tool information is being logged in file /apps/was8/profiles/appsrv01/logs/server01/startServer.log ADMU0128I: Starting tool with the appsrv01 profile ADMU3100I: Reading configuration for server: server1 ADMU3200I: Server launched. Waiting for initialization status.
When the server has actually started, you will see an extra line mentioning that the server has started and its associated UNIX Process ID (PID).
ADMU3000I: Server server01 open for e-business; process id is 3813
Now that the application server has started, we can navigate to the admin console URL.
We can craft the URL as follows:
http://<hostname>:<port>/ibm/console.
We noted earlier that an important port was the admin_default port, which in our case is 9060. By using this port and the IP address/hostname/FQDN of our server, we can access the admin console with our favorite web browser using a URL similar to the following URL:
http://node01.waslocal.com:9060/ibm/console.
Note
If you made a host-file modification on our desktop machine, we would be able to use a hostname or FQDN to access the admin console from your workstation as by default, the hostname on the server will not be known to a client machine unless you use DNS.
If you are able to browse from the local server machine where the application server is running, you can use http://localhost:9060/ibm/console.
When we navigate to the admin console URL, we see the following login screen:
During the installation, we opted not to turn on global security, and so we can log in using any username and no password is required. For the purpose of this book, we will log in using wasadmin for the User ID field.
Once logged in, we can see the administration console welcome screen and the main navigation panel on the left-hand side (LHS). Looking at the LHS panel shown in the following screenshot, we can see a list of all the configuration items, that is features and resources that are available for WAS administration:
The administration panel provides a GUI that allows administrators to administer WAS. There is also an interactive command-line interface called wsadmin.sh for Linux or wsadmin.bat for Windows, which is used for administering WAS without using the admin console. We will cover administrative scripting in Chapter 5,Administrative Scripting.