Clearcase Web Server
The Clearcase web service died today. I don't know why but the following is what I did to get it back up and running.
Server is back up.
Problem analysis:
Not really sure where things went wrong however when I looked at it the Rational Web Platform (rwp - which is really just Apache with Tomcat under the hood) was not running. rwp creates error logs but they are hard to parse because there are many of them with apparently random numbers tacked on. I believe these numbers represent the date in some form but haven't figured out how to decode them.
Anyway, I tried moving them aside and to restart the rwp server so that it would be clear what the error file was. Couldn't move all the log files out of the way because some were busy. Wish I had a good tool to figure out who has a file open.
The error message when trying to start rwp was "The Rational Web Platform HTTP Service Terminated with Service-Specific Error 1". Searching the Rational Support site yielded that the reason the service could not start was because some other process was using port 80. Typically this is due to somebody else runnig IIS. No IIS running. Tried netstat but could not find who was using port 80. Tried telneting to port 80 and got "Connection failed" so whoever was using port 80 did not want to talk to me! :-)
Finally I tried running rwp.exe from the command line with --help hoping for help about rwp's possible command line opts. Instead rwp started and ran! Clearcase web was back up but I did not like having rwp running in a console window and if I were to log out I feared that the rwp process would end. So I went to the Services applet and tried to start (since there was no stop) rwp. It started and the rwp running in the console ended. For safety's sake I restarted the rwp service through the Services applet. I believe Clearcase web is OK for now and we are doign server maintainance tonight anyway...