I have come across a horrible little *feature* that occurs sometimes with WebSphere Portal where the server fails to start and writes absoutely nothing to the log … Just a tad annoying when you are trying to work out why it didn’t start in the first place.
Sometimes this is due to a tranlog problem which is pretty straight forward to resolve:
backup / delete the directory –
< profile root >/tranlog/cellname/nodename/servername
normally this will do the trick and a restart works – if it doesn’t do the following
rename the log folders (or delete them)
< profile root >/logs
to fix the issue that I had seen I had to rename the ffdc, nodeagent and portal server log directories
restart the servers in question and as if by magic it starts 🙂
I have experienced this at Portal 6.1.5 but I have had reports that this also appears to be a problem on 6.1.0.2 as well