Unable to access the administrative console

You are trying to access the WebSphere administrative console and the login page is not being displayed. Instead, you see a blank page or an HTTP 404 error, page not found error.

You experience this problem immediately after installing WebSphere Application Server, after enabling security, after adding a node to the deployment manager, or after restarting the WebSphere Application Server process.

 àWhat to look for:

This problem can occur because the server that hosts the administrative console is not running, or you are trying to connect to the wrong port number. It can also occur if the administrative console files have been accidently deleted or security is incorrectly configured.

Verify the port number and URL
By default, access to the administrative console is via the following URL:

http://<host>:9060/ibm/console

However, the port is configurable, and if multiple profiles have been installed on a machine, the port might be different from the default.

Review the WebSphere Application Server SystemOut.log to ensure that the administrative console has started. You will see messages similar to below, showing you that the administrative console has started and on which port the administrative console is listening.

ex: Administrative console startup messages in SystemOut.log file:

[6/22/05 9:58:31:342 EDT] 0000001b ApplicationMg A WSVR0221I: Application
started: adminconsole
[6/22/05 9:58:31:492 EDT] 0000000a TCPChannel A TCPC0001I: TCP Channel
TCP_1 is listening on host * (IPv4) port 9060.

You can also see the port number by looking at the port specified for WC_adminhost in:

<WAS_install_root>/profiles/<profile>/config/cells/<cell>\nodes\<node>\serverindex.xml

Verify that the adminconsole application has started:

If the administrative console fails to start, you will see errors similar to those shown:

Ex: Administrative console failure messages

[7/3/05 15:10:29:359 EDT] 0000000a DeployedAppli E WSVR0100W: An error occurred initializing,
adminconsole
java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\IBM\WAS6\AppServer\systemApps\adminconsole.ear\deployment.xml
(The system cannot find the path specified)at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)

The error indicates the cause of the problem. In Ex, a file is missing. Thus, the administrative console cannot start. The solution to the example problem is to either restore the missing files or to re-install WebSphere Application Server.

àVerify the security configuration:

You might not be able to access the administrative console application if security is enabled due to a problem with the digital certificates that are used to setup an SSL communication between your browser and WebSphere Application Server.

How to manually turn off security: If you have a problem with security, you might not be able to access the administration tools. You can turn off security manually by editing the security.xml file. This allows you to access the administrative console so that you can fix the original problem.

You can find the security.xml file in the configuration directory structure under:
<WAS_install_root>/profiles/<profile>/config/cells/<cell>/security.xml
Edit the security tag to set enabled to false as shown in the following:
<security:Security xmi:version=”2.0″ xmlns:xmi=”http://www.omg.org/XMI”
xmlns:orb.securityprotocol=”http://www.ibm.com/websphere/appserver/schemas/5
.0/orb.securityprotocol.xmi”
xmlns:security=”http://www.ibm.com/websphere/appserver/schemas/5.0/security.
xmi” xmi:id=”Security_1″ useLocalSecurityServer=”true”
useDomainQualifiedUserNames=”false” enabled=”false” cacheTimeout=”600″
issuePermissionWarning=”true” activeProtocol=”BOTH”
enforceJava2Security=”true” enforceFineGrainedJCASecurity=”false”
activeAuthMechanism=”SWAMAuthentication_1″
activeUserRegistry=”LocalOSUserRegistry” defaultSSLSettings=”SSLConfig_1″>
You need to restart the server for this change to take effect.