WebSphere Portal Interview Questions for an Administrator

List of interview questions that will help you in technical interview. 1. What is the difference between Application Server and Portal Server ? Application servers extend the ability of a Web server to handle Web application requests, and enable a server to generate a dynamic, customized response to a client request. A portal server extends the application server by providing a portlet container that can run port lets and to create portal a website that provides users with a single point of access to Web-based resources by aggregating those resources in one place. 2. What are the steps involved in deploying themes and skins in a clustered production web sphere portal environment? Export the Web Sphere wps.ear (Portal EAR) using wsadmin. Use Ear Expander tool to expand the exported wps.ear file. Copy the updated themes and skins into../themes/html,/skins/html folder. Use Ear Expander tool to collapse the EAR directory into an EAR file. Use wsadmin to update the wps.ear to complete the deployment of updated themes and skins. 3. What changes needs to be done to view changes to your theme and skins JSPs without restarting the portal server? You need to enable automatic JSP loading by setting reloading Enable property to true in ibm-web-ext.xmi file of the wps.ear. 4. What are the 3 different ways of installing a portlet application in web Sphere Portal ? Install a portlet using the portal administration page using Web Modules portlet. Install a portlet using xmlaccess tool. Pre-deploy a portlet as a standard EAR by installing the portlet WAR file in WAS console and then registering the portlet using xmlaccess. 5. What is the purpose of XML Access configuration file Export.xml & ExportRelease.xml? What is the difference? & When will you use one over the other? Export.xml exports the complete portal configuration and useful when transferring configurations between development installations. ExportRelease.xml exports the complete portal configuration from the release domain as required by the portal Release Builder tool and useful when transferring different release configurations between staging and production environments. 6. List me the steps involved in building a release in web Sphere Portal ? If you have a completely new installation of the staging server and the production server: Install the staging server, then install the production server. Develop a release on the staging server.

Build the release on the staging server. Empty portal contents on the production server by running the WPSconfig.sh|bat actionempty-portal task. Import that release onto the production server. Refer to Transferring a complete configuration for information. If you already have a production server without a staging system: Export the release of your production server. Install an empty staging server using one of the following two methods: Install the staging server with the flag -W emptyPortal.active=True. After installing and configuring the staging server, run the WPSconfig.sh|bat action-emptyportal task. Import the production release onto the staging server. Refer to Transferring a complete configuration for information. Develop and build a new release on the staging server. Export that new release from the staging server. Use Release Builder to generate the differential between the two releases. Import the differential onto the production server. 7. What is the purpose of Release Builder tool in web Sphere Portal ? Release Builder enables management of release configurations independent of user configurations and used during staging of follow-on releases of WebSphere portals, configurations, and artifacts need to be moved between systems. 8. What are the steps involved in editing WebSPhere Member Manager (wmm.xml) files on a federated node ? On the primary node of the WebSphere Portal cluster, check out the files using ./WPSconfig.sh check-out-wmm-cfg-files-from-mgr. task. Make any changes to the Member Manager files. The files can be edited in the portal_server_root/wmm directory on the WebSphere Portal node. When you have completed your changes, check the files back in using ./WPSconfig.sh checkin-wmm-cfg-files-to-dmgr. 9. How to change the default portal URI /wps/portal after installation ? Set the property WpsContextRoot to the new URI and run ./WPSConfig.sh modify-servletpath task. 10. List different types of user registry supported by WebSphere Portal ? LDAP (includes LDAP with an optional database user registry). Database user registry. Custom User registry, (non-LDAP, non-database). 11. What is LDAP realm support and why would I want to use it? A Realm allows you to group users from one or more LDAP trees of one user registry and expose them as a coherent user population to WebSphere Portal; this is also referred to as horizontal partitioning. Realms allow a flexible user management with various configuration

options; for example, you can combine principals from one or more corporate LDAP tree. A realm must be mapped to a Virtual Portal to allow the realm's defined user population to login to the Virtual Portal. 12. What is an Application group and why would I want to use it ? Application groups are a concept that allows you to define user groups within the database user registry with members (users or groups) contained in the LDAP user registry you configured. The benefit of application groups is that you can create Groups that are only used in WebSphere Portal particularly in scenarios where there is Read-only LDAP or special group setup specific to the portal. 13. What are the two methods to install the empty staging WebSphere portal server ? Empty portal contents on the staging server by running the ./WPSconfig.sh action-emptyportal. Install portal with the ./install.sh -W emptyPortal.active="True" option. 14. How do you stop portal traffic to the node being upgraded in 24x7 cluster upgrade process ? Locate the cluster member being upgraded, and change the value in the Configured weight column from a value to zero and make sure the plugin config information is propagated to webserver to stop traffic. 15. How to set limits on searches for users and groups? Setting a maximum number of search results maximumSearchResults="200" in wmm.xml 16. What portal resources are scoped for virtual portal? Portal pages. Portlet instances. Portal Search Engine search services and search collections. This includes the search content sources. 17. What portal resources can't be separated for virtual portal ? Themes and skins. Vault segments and vault slots. Supported clients and mark-ups. Composite applications and templates. Policies. 18. How do you enable temporary and extended trace logging for WebSphere Portal ? Temporary traces can be set for a temporary period by using the administration portlet Enable Tracing or the IBM WebSphere Application Server administrative console and also using the Enable Tracing portlet in the portal administration page. To enable extended trace settings for a longer period of time, that is, for more than one session, switch them on in the WebSphere Application Server configuration, save the

updates and restart the portal server. 19. What are the different states of the syndication process ? Idle: No syndication is occurring. Pending: A request has been made to the syndicator, but it has yet to initiate a request to the syndication application. Queued: The syndicator has sent a request to the syndication application, but syndication is not yet active. Active: Syndication is occurring between the syndicator and subscriber. Disabled: Syndication is currently disabled. 20. What are the two types of rendering portlets ? Local rendering portlet and Remote rendering portlet. IBM WebSphere Application Server Interview Questions 1. What is the difference between Web Server and Application Server? Webserver: A Web server handles the HTTP protocol. When the Web server receives an HTTP request, it responds with an HTTP response, such as sending back an HTML page. To process a request, a Web server may respond with a static HTML page or image, send a redirect, or delegate the dynamic response generation to some other program such as CGI scripts, JSPs (Java Server Pages), servlets, ASPs (Active Server Pages), server-side JavaScripts, or some other server-side technology. Whatever their purpose, such server-side programs generate a response, most often in HTML, for viewing in a Web browser. Application Server: As for the application server, according to our definition, an application server exposes business logic to client applications through various protocols, possibly including HTTP. While a Web server mainly deals with sending HTML for display in a Web browser, an application server provides access to business logic for use by client application programs. The application program can use this logic just as it would call a method on an object 2. What is JDBC? JDBC technology is an API (included in both J2SE and J2EE releases) that provides cross-DBMS connectivity to a wide range of SQL databases and access to other tabular data sources, such as spread sheets or flat files. With a JDBC technology-enabled driver, you can connect all corporate data even in a heterogeneous environment 3. What is EJB? Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology is the server-side component architecture for the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. EJB technology enables rapid and simplified development of distributed, transactional, secure and portable applications based on Java technology.

4. What are the different application servers and Web Servers supporting J2EE technology's ? JBoss Is an Application Server that supports J2EE IBM Web sphere and BEA Web Logic servers are a combination of Application Server, Web Server & container Jakarta Tomcat is a Servlet container and a Web server. Apache Sever is a Web server 5. What is the WebSphere Application Server Console and what is it's role? What is the default URL and port for accessing it? The administrative console is a browser-based interface that allows you to configure application server settings, deploy and manage applications, and perform additional tasks that are not included in the HTTP Server Administration interface. It used to be a Java application, however to be firewall safe it was made into a web-based application. It runs on the default install port 9060 e.g http:\\hostname:9060\ibm\console, however this can be changed by editing virtual hosts names. also when during installation ie GUI or response-file install you can set the ports that will be used. 6. What Development Environment(s) are available to develop applications for WebSphere? IBM provides several industrial strength development environments based on Eclipse development framework the current IDE is Rational Developer for Web sphere. Applications can also be developed with the Web sphere Application Server Toolkit and third party tools like Builder, and Eclipse/ANT etc. 7. In WebSphere how would you provide the ability for an Web application (JSP) to be able to provide authentication for both a local user and LDAP. Using the Administration Console:

Turn on Administrative security. Federate a local repository and an LDAP repository together. Restart server. Ensure Web application has a web.xml file to be able assign LDAP groups to roles.

8. What version of Websphere software is required to install WebSphere clustering? How would you configure Websphere for clustering: list basic steps? WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment is the software required to install a WebSphere cluster.

Install base with Deployment Manager Create profiles for Deployment Manager and each node in the cell using with the Profile Management Tool ensuring the nodes are federated.

Use the Deployment Manager's Administration Console to create the cluster and set cluster settings as appropriate. Create Windows Services or Start up scripts for Deployment Manager, Node manager and Severs to ensure restart when OS is rebooted.

9. How would you ensure that a Websphere Application server or Websphere Application Server Node is started when the OS being windows 2000/2003 is re-booted? Use the command WAS Service to register the Websphere Application Server or Websphere Application node as a Windows service. 10. What language is the default scripting language for Websphere and which language is the preferred scripting language? What Websphere tool can be used to run scripts and where is it located? JACL is the default scripting language for WAS, Both JACL and Jython can be used. Jython is the preferred scripting language as JACL is now deprecated. WSAdmin tool located in the <installroot>\bin directory 11. What types of files are required to deploy an application into Websphere. How can they be installed? WAR or EAR files. Can be installed using Administration Console or scripts. 12. How would use ensure WebSphere server logs are created on a different drive than the installation root? Change the WebSphere server's server variables using the Administrative Console or use scripts.