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Rarely do we get the “privilege” of working in freezing cold server rooms to access Aqualogic portal servers directly. Instead, the connection of choice is the Remote Desktop Connection application that connects to Terminal Services on those systems.

It’s pretty common to have to move files to and from these servers, and the usual route [...]

Publisher is one of the most critical infrastructure pieces of the ALUI portal, since it provides some of the most visible pieces of the average portal page (such as the header and footer). For this reason, it should be configured to be as fault-tolerant as possible.

A common misconception is that Publisher is a single, self-contained [...]

Here’s a neat (albeit relatively trivial) trick: Ever notice when you go to some web sites, the default icon changes from the little IE or FireFox icon? You can do that for your portal too, and it’s simple.

Just create a small icon (16×16), save it as “favicon.ico”, and put it in the root [...]

If you work different environments (dev, test, prod) with a lot of servers (portal, publisher, collab, search), you’ve no doubt experience the problem where you’re looking at a remote window of a machine and completely forget which machine it is. Or, say, you know what the machine name is from the title bar, but [...]

We’ve touched on this time and again – optimizing your Aqualogic Portal is tricky because there are so many moving parts. We’ve talked about optimizations on the front end (image server), back end (portlet servers), and today I’d like to share a diagram that covers a lot of the HTTP requests in between.

The following [...]

Here’s a quick and easy tip: when someone reports the ALUI Portal is “slow”, have them do a View:Source on the page and scroll to the bottom. There they should see an HTML comment on how long it took for the page to render:

Not only can you see what server the page was [...]

Integration products in the Aqualogic product suite often have diagnotic pages built in, and sometimes it’s not that obvious how to get to them. But if you know the right URLs, they can provide a huge amount of useful information and sometimes even tips on how to remedy common problems. Note that you may be [...]

In my last post, I talked about all the HTTP requests that are made during a single ALUI portal page request. One of the things you may have noticed was that all HTTP requests were routed through the portal and the portal gateway. In cases where you’ve got portlet HTML that needs to [...]

A complaint that comes up all the time is “The portal is slow”. And from the end-users’ perspective, this can be true – users shouldn’t have to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to load.

But that simple statement overlooks the fact that there are many different servers involved in the [...]

I was recently at a client site who was having problems with their Single Sign-On Settings. They were using RSA ClearTrust with ALUI running behind WebLogic 8.1 and were seeing performance issues related to SSO. We started troubleshooting the problem by looking at a combination of RSA settings, the portalconfig.xml, and various settings on Apache [...]