Release Notes for SunTM ONE Application Server, Enterprise Edition

Formerly known as iPlanetTM Application Server.

Version 6.5 Service Pack 1, Maintenance Update 5 for x86/Windows Platform

Part Number: 817-6801-10

Updated April 20, 2004 

These release notes contain important information available at the time of the Version 6.5 SP1, Maintenance Update 5 release of Sun ONE Application Server, Enterprise Edition.

This document contains the following sections:

Installation Notes 

This section contains information about installing Sun ONE Application Server 6.5 SP1 Enterprise Edition, Maintenance Update 5. For detailed information about installation procedures, see Sun ONE Application Server Installation Guide at Sun documentation web site.

Relevant Architecture: x86

Relevant Operating Systems: Windows NT 4.0 SP6a, Windows 2000 Professional SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP2, Windows 2000 Advanced Server (and all its Service Packs).

Files included with this patch:

.\ias\bin\gxbindu.dll
.\ias\bin\gxreposit.dll
.\ias\bin\gxprincipal.dll
.\ias\bin\iASApachePlugin.dll
.\ias\bin\gxdsync.dll
.\ias\bin\jx2thread.dll
.\ias\bin\jx2ebfp.dll
.\ias\bin\gxagent.dll
.\ias\bin\gxnsapi6.dll
.\ias\bin\gxisapi.dll
.\ias\bin\gxorcl.dll
.\ias\bin\gxsecurity.dll
.\ias\bin\gxutil.dll
.\ias\bin\gxmailbox.dll
.\ias\bin\gxconn.dll
.\ias\bin\kas.exe
.\ias\bin\kjs.exe
.\ias\bin\kxs.exe
.\ias\bin\patchversion.exe
.\ias\bin\iascontrol.bat
.\ias\classes\java\kfcjdk11.jar
.\ias\classes\java\kfcjdk11_properties.jar
.\ias\classes\java\kadmin.jar
.\ias\classes\java\buzz.jar
.\ias\classes\java\jasper.jar
.\ias\classes\java\jts.jar
.\ias\usr\java\jre\lib\ext\jasper.jar
.\ias\kdb\en_US\gxserver.properties

Installation Instructions

  1. Install Activestate Perl (ActivePerl) version 5.6.0 or later. You can download it from http://www.activestate.com.

  2. Ensure that all application server processes have been shutdown.

  3. Ensure that the directory server is running.

  4. If the Web server is running on the same machine as Sun ONE Application Server, then stop the Web server before installing this update.

  5. Become the user who had installed the Sun ONE Application Server you want to patch.

  6. Change the working directory to the directory containing the patch.

  7. Apply the Update by typing:

    perl .\applypatch

    8.

Special Install Instructions

Uninstallation Instructions

  1. Become the user who had installed the application server installation for which you want to backout the patch.

  2. Ensure that all webserver and application server processes have been shutdown.

  3. Ensure that the directory server is running.

  4. Change working directory to the directory where the backup data is saved. The backup data is saved in a directory named backup_patch number in your Sun ONE Application Server installation directory:

    Example: cd c:\iplanet\ias6\ias\backup_5

  5. Uninstall the Update by typing:

    perl .\unpatch

    Note: If the Webconnector plugin is installed on a different machine, then you must uninstall the update from the Webconnector directory as well. To restore the old files from the backup directory, follow the steps given under Uninstallation Instructions.

  6. You have to manually remove all files in the backup directory after the Maintenance Update uninstallation is over.

    Note: The presence of the backup directory does not affect the reinstallation of the same patch. However you may want to remove the files in the backup directory to save disk space.

Special Uninstallation Instructions

If the installation process quits after patching some of the files, then follow these steps to restore the older files:

  1. Change the working directory to the backup_patch number directory present in your Sun ONE Application Server installation.

  2. Copy and rename the file unpatch.bak to unpatch.bat.

  3. Run the following command:

    .\unpatch.bat

    This command will restore the files that were patched.

  1. Copy the file gxisapi.dll from the Sun ONE Application Server installation backup directory to the IIS installation and rename the file to gx.dll. This will restore the original IIS plugin.

Special Instructions

Resolved Issues

The following table lists the critical issues resolved in Sun ONE Application Server, Enterprise Edition 6.5 SP1, Maintenance Update 5 release. This list also includes bugs fixed in Maintenance Update 1, 2, 3, and 4 releases. 

Table 1    List of resolved issues 
 

Bug ID 

Description 
4559011 Cleaning of EBStore directory where passivated bean references are stored.
4647921 Sticky cookie not set properly on JSP.
4832946 Stack overflowed thread should not be reused.
4945330 KJS coredump at GX.JNIJavaExceptionToRC.
4954632 .shtml includes not populating on the first access of the webpage.
4959496 Isolate root cause of memory corruption with iAS 6.5 SP1 MUx.
4975535 Enhance existing 6.5 Dsync logging mechanism with date time stamps and native thread id.
4979275 Connection Pool masks RunTimeException.
4979370 Global txn timeout mgr rolls back the tx instead of marking it for rollback.
4809560 Deployment issues with SQL statements that contain characters like '>' or '<'.
4953597 iAS65 has classloader issues while loading array classes.
4964179 JS throws java.util.ConcurrentModificationException on saveSession on frame ACC.
4630591 Webconnector crash with 128 servletpatterntrans for one application.
4834516 Engine shutdown time is broken.
4826642 Sun ONE Aplication Server doesn't failover if it's stopped in a particular fashion with maxbackups=2.
4828203 TransactionTimer.rollback may cause Transaction not to be able to begin and slow.
4919346 WebPlugin RunConnection() pthread_create API use bug causing some resource leakage.
4923837 ias_has_been_authenticated should be set with certain values, instead of "".
4922415 IAS_MULTIPLE_TCPIP_INTERFACE env not read properly and bind to IP not working.
4926103 java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException when using codebase.
4752117 Deadlock in ORB.
4941468 JSP:forward throws Error: 500 SC_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR.
4849445 Reconstruct URL when forwarding requests between the various components of the request path.
4666151 Plugin fills the error logs with FilterLite::StreamWrite() failure messages.
4808427 Deadlock in cleanUP() and destroy() in ConnectionPool for JDBC driver.
4798957 PDF file does not load from IE browser.
4872305 KJS threads hang on PlatformNASSession.invalidate forever.
4540200 Stateful Session Bean is recycling without clearing internal content.
4836194 Hang on createSession().
4884791 KJS crashes at Java_com_kivasoft_ebfp_FPRequest_invokenative.
4878322 IP address and port of host sent to browser when appserver is down.
4846902 Application server unable to locate JSP dynamically if that JSP has been missing previously.
4854912 JSP being recompiled at each iAS startup.
4852986 Webserver crashes when a request with a malformed URL is made from the browser.
4834034 EJBC compiler spikes CPU on Win2k and freezes compile. Have to perform CTRL+C to continue.
4892620 Patchversion script dose not handle Exception Release version.
4877248 KJS crashes due to Memory corruption.
4774589 Connection Pool statistics for maxIdleTime and reclaimedTimeout connections not captured.
4809129 Timestamp not printed in log.
4799058 All version up to iAS6.5 SP1 IIS plugin has request GX2GX error
4788127 Socket remains in CLOSE_WAIT state forever on Windows platform.
4805009 Java files with wrong names created from JSPs when run through the JSP precompiler.
4808387 Crash in failover code.
4820280 ksvradmin fails to start if Datasource entries are greater than 204 characters.
4819229 CXS process does not start, when using other than the default launcher while starting.
4797959 Sun ONE Application Server webconnector crashes when uploading file with wrong Content-Length Mime.
4828101 Issues with LDAP authentication.
4828267 Connection pool of Jconnect5.5 showing strange auto-commit behaviour.
4769407 Pre-compilation of JSPs not working.
4571019 Database connections cleanup not working for NAS 2.1 and C++ applogics.
4836387 Webconnector crashes when ServletName (web.xml)is longer than path.
4820534 EJB passivate() method throws a NullPointerException.
4764851 JSPC compilation issues during runtime.
4754456 HTTP response from JSPs contains offending CRLF right after HTTP header.
4770671 Request parameters are getting lost(except 1) when going to FBA login page.
4779207 Registered JSP pages fail to execute properly on 6.5 MU3.
4689007 Webconnector logs "info (5242): gxrequest.cpp:gxrequest()..."
4767997 Enable Dynamic Class Reloading check box gets unselected after restart.
4750058 Dsync Logging causes KXS to crash.
4761598 JDBC connection pool not releasing connection when an error occurs in db.
4711735 iPlanet Application Server  6.0 sp3 KJS not load sharing properly.
4754692 Request forwarding is not working when there is a space character in parameter
4735914 Struts template application is not formatting page properly.
4768799 The info for dynamic reloading of servlets is not shown in a log form in KJS.
4672041 MDB Durable Subscribers always create a new subscription.
4804086 Could not configure a durable topic from the deploytool during deployment.
4761319 KXS crashes when customer tries to retrieve any cached information.
4760264 Client Certificate Authentication fails with certificates from iCMS 4.2sp2.
4758869 Context is wrong after FBA with GET.
4762957 deploytool does not handle the editing of the deploy descriptors correctly.
4768669 When username is same as group name ias authorizes an invalid user to login (FBA).
4693651 Monitoring "Total Threads" does not work.
4794965 Urgent need for ias-web.xml server-info tags to work.
4640716 Cluster problems in DSYNC.
4783055 KXS core dumps in GXBuffer::Alloc().
4825234 KJS Hangs at saveSession.
4871079 KeepAliveTimeOut is measured in seconds.

Known Issues and Limitations

This section describes known problems and associated workarounds with Sun ONE Application Server, Enterprise Edition 6.5 SP1, Maintenance Update 5.

 
ID  Summary 
4995181
Problem
Incorrect information on session failover in Sun ONE Application Server Performance and Tuning Guide.
The Performance and Tuning Guide mentions that to enable session failover for all KJS processes in an application server instance, you should set the cluster configuration to Dsync-Local.

Setting the cluster configuration to Local will not provide session failover.

Workaround

To enable session failover for your application, set the cluster configuration to Distributed.

4816176
Problem
EJB methods that have container managed transaction attributes do not throw exceptions to caller when the underlying transaction gets rolled back because of transaction timeout.
Use the following workaround for this bug.

Workaround

Set transaction time out to a very high value. The registry key to be modified is CCS0\\TXNMGR\\Timeout. This time out value is measured in seconds and is applicable to both global and local transactions. The maximum allowable value is the result of Java expression, Integer.MAX_VALUE/1000.

4719687
Problem
Cluster entries in LDAP are not deleted after uninstallation.

Workaround

Cluster entries are not removed from LDAP, as it might effect other configurations present in the directory server. The presence of these old entries does not cause any issues regarding Application Server versions or the server's functionality.

If absolutely required, you can manually remove the old cluster entries.

4537418
Problem
SFSB failover is not supported over the RMI/IIOP path. The same session is not failed over to another KJS
4801503
Problem
Web server crashes because of missing smartheap library.
A web connector plug-in installation adds the path of the application server's libsmartheap_smp.so to the beginning of web server's LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Therefore, web server will always load the smartheap library of the application server, and crashes if this smartheap is not found.

Workaround

Ensure that the web server's LD_LIBRARY_PATH is pointing to the correct smartheap library, expecially of you have uninstalled the web connector plug-in.
4874547
Problem
Version of Oracle 9i database support information is imprecise in documentation.
Sun ONE Application Server is certified with to work with Oracle 9i (9.0.1.x) database and clients. Oracle 9.2.0.1 is not supported.
4863850
Problem
Explanation of Connection Pool Sanity checking in Sun ONE Application Server is lacking details.
Additional information is provided in the Workaround.

Workaround

  • isSanityRequired. This parameter controls whether sanity checking is performed or not.
  • tableBasedSanity flag is a toggle. Therefore, the following scenarios can be used:

    • If tableBasedSanity=true, then the application server's Connection Pool will construct a select statement using the table specified by the TableName parameter and execute the statement, this is sufficient to determine if the connection is usable. Table based sanity checking is the only valid option for XA Connections.

    • If tableBasedSanity=false, then the application server's Connection Pool will attempt to toggle the Connection's autoCommit status. However, if the DataSource has been configured to use an XA Connection, then the sanity checking will not be attempted as this could impact any transaction being used over the connection.

    • If TableBasedSanity=true and TableName is not set, then the Connection Pool will try to use the table, ias_table. This table does not exist normally and would need to be created. Since no data will be returned, this table can simply consist of a single column with any supported name and database datatype, for example:

      CREATE IAS_TABLE ( dummyCol NUMBER );

4939828
Problem
The registry values of SyncTimerInterval for individual engines is incorrectly mentioned in Sun ONE Application Server 6.5 SP1 Performance and Tuning Guide.
The guide refers to the wrong registry path for the individual settings of each engine: SOFTWARE\iPlanet\Application Server\6.0\CCSO\ENG\\SyncTimerInterval.

Workaround

The corrrect path in the registry is \SOFTWARE\iPlanet\Application Server\6.5\Clusters\\SyncTimerInterval.
The documentation may contain other similar bugs, where the registry path may not have been updated from the iPlanet Application Server 6.0 release. In most cases, replacing 6.0 with 6.5 will give you the correct path.

4786743
Problem
Sun ONE Directory Server 5.0 SP1 patch installation instructions are not clear.
The installation procedure is explained in the Workaround.

Workaround

Follow these instructions to install Sun ONE Directory Server 5.0 SP1 Patch on Windows. This patch must be copied to the appropriate directory before installing Sun ONE Application Server 6.5, Enterprise Edition.

  1. Copy the contents of the product CD under the Windows/iAS directory to a local directory on your machine. The Windows/iAS directory contains the setup program and all dependent files required to install the application server.

  2. Copy the slapd.z file from the iDS50SP1patch/Windows directory on the product CD to the slapd directory on your machine. The slapd directory can be found in the local directory to which you had copied the Sun ONE Application Server files, in step 1.

  3. Run the application server setup program from this local directory, instead of the product CD.
4763145
Problem
Sun ONE Application Server Java Programmer's Guide has incorrect DD for the welcome file list.
The guide incorrectly shows a leading /, which is contrary to Servlet 2.3 specification.

Workaround

The welcome file list should be specified according to the Servlet specifications: "The welcome file list is an ordered list of partial URLs with no trailing or leading /."
4928313
Problem
Documentation about IAS_KXS_HANG_INTERVAL in Sun ONE Application Server, Enterprise Edition Version 6.5 Service Pack 1 is incorrect.

The document incorrectly states that If the KXS thread is unable to deliver the request in this specified time, then it times-out and assigns the request to the another KJS.

The corrected documentation would read: If the KXS thread is unable to deliver the request in the specified time, the request will time-out (it will be lost and will have to be resubmitted by the client). It will not be re-routed to another KJS engine.

4816588
Problem
Precompiled JSPs requires contentType to indicate non-standard charset.
There is a change in behaviour when a JSP is compiled outside the application server runtime environment compared to when a JSP is compiled within the application server runtime on demand.

Workaround

When JSPs are compiled using command line JSP compiler, unless user uses contentType directive in the JSP to indicate the charset to be used for JSP encoding, the compiler uses the default charset (8859_1) for that JSP. This is not the case when a JSP is compiled within the application server runtime environment because in such a case if there is no contentType directive the charset for application server is used.
4735296
Problem
In a distributed environment setup for load balancing, application components are served even if the application server instance hosting the the component have been disabled.
4878322
Problem
By default, the application server's IP address and port number will not be displayed if the application server goes down.

Workaround

To know the IP address and port number of the machine on which the application server went down, set the debug mode of webconnector plug-in to 2 or greater.
4892677, 4858315
Problem
Redeployment of an updated version of an application does not remove the contents of the previous deployment from the file system area.

In addition to leftover file system content, some of the application server registry settings are also not overwritten and/or removed as an application is redeployed.á

This behavior can lead to older application settings remaining in effect after a redeploy.á

Workaround

To perform a clean redeployment, first perform a remove (iasdpeloy removeapp, removemodule, etc.) followed by a deploy.

To remove unnecessary entries from the file system in a much faster way, set the registry key, Application Server\6.5\Deployment\cleanup, to true before redeploying applications.

4805318
Problem
StaticServlet does not serve internationalized document correctly.

This problem will be seen by machines that does not have LANG set (mostly English countries) and that want to serve non iso-8859-1 characters (non 7-bit characters).

Workaround

  1. Edit iasenv.ksh and set LC_ALL to proper language and character set.

    Use the format, export LC_ALL=ja_JP.PCK.

  2. Re-start the application server.

  3. Open the application in the Deployment tool.

  4. Open the Deployment Descriptor panel.

  5. Go to the NLS tab and map the required locale (in this case ja) to the charset of the HTML file.

  6. Deploy the application and access the HTML file.

4731873
Problem 
Struts templates are not handled properly in Sun ONE Application Server 6.5 Maintenance Update 5.

Workaround 
Use the following recommended procedure to perform the flush operation.

Change the chapterTemplate.jsp in the following manner using struts defined
attribute for template tag.

          <td><template:get name='sidebar' flush='true'/></td>
      <td><table>
                <tr><td><template:get name='header' flush='true'/></td></tr>
                <tr><td><template:get name='content' flush='true'/></td></tr>
                <tr><td><template:get name='footer' flush='true'/></td></tr>
          </table>
      </td>

 The only addition here is flush='true' in every template:get tag which flushes the buffer before every include.

4858315 
Problem
Redeployment of an updated version of an application does not delete LDAP entries if the updated application has less registered components than previous deployments. This can leave "orphan" entries that are difficult to remove. 

This behavior can lead to older application settings remaining in effect after a redeploy. 

Workaround
To perform a clean redeployment, first perform a remove followed by a deploy.

4943890 
Problem
Documentation error in Sun ONE Application Server Performance and Tuning Guide.

Use the correct description mentioned under Workaround.

Workaround

In Chapter 9, "Validating Server Performance," of the English version of Performance and Tuning Guide, use SOFTWARE\iPlanet\Application Server\6.5\CCS0\HTTPAPI\NASRespTime=1 instead of SOFTWARE\iPlanet\Application Server\6.0\CCS0\HTTPAPI\NASRespTime=1.

In the Japanese version of the same document, use SOFTWARE\iPlanet\Application Server\6.5\CCS0\HTTPAPI\NASRespTime=1, instead of SOFTWARE\iPlanet\Application Server\6.0\CCS0\HTTPAPI\NASRespTime=1

4964960 
Problem
Incorrect database configuration information for IBM DB/2 in Sun ONE Application Server Administration Guide.

The Administration Guide gives the wrong path to the java classes for configuring IBM DB2. Use the correct description mentioned under Workaround.

Workaround

The path should be DB2DIR/sqlib/java12/db2java.zip and D:\SQLLIB\java12\db2java.zip instead of DB2DIR/java/db2java.zip and D:\SQLLLIB\java\db2java.zip for Solaris and Windows, respectively.

In addition, the application server class, com.iplanet.ias.jdbc.IASConnectionPoolDataSource requires the JDBC Driver Class to be specified as COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.app.DB2Driver.

Additional Information

Useful Sun ONE information can be found at the following Internet locations:

Use of Sun ONE Application Server, Enterprise Edition is subject to the terms described in the license agreement accompanying it.

Copyright © 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Last Updated March 24, 2004