WebLogic authentication with Siteminder

We have encountered this issue while setting up siteminder on weblogic 9.2
Once the request is authenticated through policy server/siteminder, weblogic would ask for login again.

This is because, for WebLogic Server versions 9.2 and later, client requests that use HTTP BASIC authentication must pass WebLogic Server authentication, even if access control is not enabled on the target resource.

The corresponding configMbean flag is enforce-valid-basic-auth-credentials and default is "true".
We would have to set this to "false" to disable default weblogic authentication.
For some reason, this does not seem to be configurable through Admin console.
We would have to edit config.xml as:

Link to BEA docs

WebLogic WLST Script Generator

WLS10.x comes with a recording feature whereby WLST scripts can be generated by recording a set of actions through Admin Console.
This is a screen snapshot of recording to generate WLST script.



Once generated, the script can be augmented to suit our needs.
For instance, I created a set of managed servers and added them to a cluster through Admin console.
The generated script (say sample.py) would look like:

startEdit()
cd('/')
cmo.createServer('managed1')
cd('/Servers/managed1')
cmo.setListenAddress('')
cmo.setListenPort(7003)
cd('/')
cmo.createCluster('testcluster')
cd('/Clusters/testcluster')
cmo.setClusterMessagingMode('unicast')
cmo.setClusterBroadcastChannel('')
cd('/Servers/managed1')
cmo.setCluster(getMBean('/Clusters/testcluster'))
activate()
startEdit()
cd('/')
cmo.createServer('managed2')
cd('/Servers/managed2')
cmo.setListenAddress('')
cmo.setListenPort(7005)
cmo.setCluster(getMBean('/Clusters/testcluster'))
activate()
startEdit()

We can augment the script by adding following actions:
1) Connect to Admin Server
2) Start a change session
3) < Add the generated WLST code >
4) Disconnect from Admin Server
5) Exit WLST

This would look like:

# connect to Admin Server(username being "system" and password "weblogic" and url localhost:7001)
connect(system,weblogic,t3://localhost:7001)
edit()
< Add the generated WLST code >
disconnect()
exit()

Now the script can be called either from shell script or ant.
Here is how you call from shell script.
I learnt this from David's blog.

#!/bin/ksh
/common/bin/.wlst.sh /mywlst/sample.py "$@"

Running wlst script through ant is documented at http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs100/config_scripting/using_WLST.html#wp1093337

Another posting I found useful was to automate tasks like creating domain by reading a CSV file in WLST.
Check out Bala's blog for this and other WLST related features.

WebLogic JDBC with Oracle RAC

WebLogic can connect to oracle RAC either through weblogic multi pools or through Connect-Time failover (underlying JDBC driver will be responsible for failover)

In case of Multi Pool/Multi Datasource, each pool/datasource is assigned to one RAC node and weblogic JDBC framework would make sure of loadbalancing/failover. For WLS8.1, this can be done by configuring multi pools and from WLS9.x through Multi datasource.

In case of Connect-Time failover, underlying JDBC driver will perform the failover under failure conditions.

Transaction handling would different based on whether the transaction is local or Global( XA transaction with Prepare/commit phases).

As for global transaction, weblogic does not provide transparent failover to database connections.
If RAC node fails before COMMIT phase, application would receive an exception and this has to be handled in the application by getting a new connection and attempting to process the transaction.

There is good article that provides step by step instructions on setting on weblogic multi datasource with oracle RAC
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/weblogic/howto/rac/index.html