Just finished a Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: Administration Essentials class today. So there are lots of things floating about in my head I want try. (Thankfully we have lots of development clusters for me to break beyond repair. Kidding. Sorta.)

One of the common support questions Blackboard asks for those of us CE/Vista clients running a cluster is whether we have changed the cookie domain in weblogic.xml. This has to do with specifying where the JSESSIONIDVISTA cookie is valid. By default the value in the weblogic.xml file is set to .webct.com which is not valid anywhere (not even Blackboard.com). One of the install steps is if one is running a cluster, in the administrator node Weblogic Domain directory run some commands to extract the weblogic.xml, edit it, then run some commands to add it back to the WAR file. Placing a “REFRESH” empty file on all the managed nodes deletes the staged and cached copies of the WAR.

No big deal and easy.

Except when it isn’t?

Occasionally someone will distrust your work and want you to verify the right setting is there. Normally they say to extract the weblogic.xml again and verify it is correct there. I had a thought. Why not verify in each managed node’s cache it has the correct value?

It is easier than it sounds. In the Weblogic domain directory (where setEnv.sh is located), change directories to

$WL_DOMAIN/servers/node_name/tmp/_WL_user/webct

(NOTE: Anything I put in bold means it is custom to you and not something I can anticipate what you would use there.)

Here I just used these greps to look for my domain. If I get results for the first one, then all is well. If I don’t get results for the first, then the second one should confirm the world is falling because we are missing the cookie domain.

grep “.domain.edu” */war/WEB-INF/weblogic.xml
grep “.webct.com” */war/WEB-INF/weblogic.xml

Since we use dsh for a lot of this kind of thing, I would use our regex for the node name and add on the path pieces in common. I have not yet studied the pieces between webct and war to know for certain who they are derived except to say they appear to 6 characters long and sufficiently random as to not repeat. Any [ejw]ar exploded into the cache appears to get a unique one. So this might work?

grep “.domain.edu” $WL_DOMAIN/servers/node_name_regex/tmp/_WL_user/webct/??????/war/WEB-INF/weblogic.xml

If not, then try:

cd $WL_DOMAIN/servers/node_name_regex/tmp/_WL_user/webct/
&& pwd && grep “.domain.edu” */war/WEB-INF/weblogic.xml

I’m envisioning this method to verify a number of different things in the nodes. It especially confirms the managed node received what I expected not that the admin node has the correct something.