An anecdote that an engineer shared with me recently reminded me of a long-standing concept in manufacturing, design for production (DFP). The concept has to do with evaluating how a given operation - production line, supply chain, or an entire factory - is performing.

The demands of security have gone far beyond simply managing user accounts and restricting access between internal and external networks. Emerging business practices challenge the enterprise to create flexible and robust security architectures that meet rapidly changing business demands. This article provides best practices tips that an administrator can implement to secure an enterprise.

Business managers are demanding better, faster, and cheaper access to IT resources and environments. At the same time, IT budgets and resources are being cut, there is a proliferation of servers running at low utilization.

Wlshell is a tool designed specifically for WebLogic administrators. It combines the flexibility of a scripting language with the full control provided by the JMX interface. It is, therefore, a natural environment for the systems administrator. The units of work of the JMX specification - the Management Beans, or MBeans - are presented in wlshell in the familiar form of the file system and they look like files organized into directories and drive units.

This article is the third in a series on BEA WebLogic Server administration and management for developers. The first installment (WLDJ, Vol. 2, issue 10) focused on WebLogic Server administration concepts and terminology, and the graphical tools for packaging an application and setting up and configuring a WebLogic Server domain.

Once your BEA WebLogic Server domain is configured, you need to deploy your application. This is the second in a series of articles on BEA WebLogic Server administration and management for developers.

The need for a server-side JVM is evident. The increase in the number of Java applications on the servers, and the exponential rise in the number of clients accessing these Java applications, brings forth the shortcomings in the traditional Java VMs, which are more tuned towards client-side processing.

You're a developer, not an administrator. You think you don't care about system and application administration. Well, you should... and this series of articles on WebLogic Server administration and management for developers will explain why, and how.

Extending the functionality of the WebLogic Server Admin Console provides you with the ability to incorporate the management of your custom application into one central location.

In Part 1 of this article (WLDJ, Vol. 2, issue 6), I claimed that manageability is a vital aspect for any application that will be deployed into production, where it will spend most of its life being managed by people who may not be the original designers. These systems and applications managers will need good tools and application visbility for the deployment of the application to be successful.

When we build enterprise applications based on either a J2EE-compatible application server or an XML Web services platform, we tend to leave the manageability of our application as a problem for the base platform to solve. We therefore may not do any work in our business logic to enhance the manageability of our application in production.

Command-line scripting is a well-known and proven approach to managing enterprise software systems. We can find examples of it in operating systems, databases, and LDAP servers. This approach allows the system administrator to run system commands to manage and monitor the system interactively. It also allows you to run commands in batch mode for predefined and repetitive tasks. Is there anything similar in the J2EE world?

WebLogic Server (WLS) provides several ways to configure servers, clusters, machines, JDBC connection pools, JMS servers, and so on, using the following:

You might not want to admit it, but have you ever lost or forgotten the password for the system user within WebLogic Server (WLS) 6.1? Or worse yet, accidentally deleted the fileRealm. properties or SerializedSystemIni.dat files?

Welcome to this edition of 'In the Admin Corner,' a new monthly column devoted to the administration, configuration, management, and deployment aspects of WebLogic Server.