GridSphere Administrator's Guide

The GridSphere Administrator's Guide describes how to administer the running GridSphere portal. For more information on installing and developing portlets, please consult the GridSphere User's Guide and the GridSphere Tutorials. This guide assumes you have succesfully installed GridSphere.

Please continue reading the GridSphere Reference Guide for additional information.

When you startup GridSphere for the first time, you may login as the super user with the user name root and an empty password. Now click on the Administration tab and then go to the Users tab. Here you can select the root entry and edit your profile. At the minimum, you should change the password and enter a valid email address. This email will be used in the case that a portlet group is made private on the portal and a user wants to obtain membership.

From the Users tab as the super user, you can create also create/modify/remove users from the portal. By default, when the portal is first initialized, anyone can create a new account for themselves from the login screen. If you wish to restrict new account creation to the portal administrator, then go to the Administration=>Portlets tab to the "Configure Login" portlet. Here you can select to restrict new account creation if desired.

In the event that a user forgets their password, the portal can send the user an email link to create a new password. The administrator should configure the mail settings from Administration=>Messaging=>Configure Messaging Services and enter a valid SMTP mail server and port in the email settings. In addition, a valid email address that will be used to send messages to users should be edited e.g. portal@mycom.com.

The Administration=>Groups tab shows the "Group Manager" portlet that displays all the known portlet groups. Portlet groups can be dynamically created and are associated with a collection of portlets. In addition a group defines access rights for the portlets, and a flag to indicate which groups are public, private and hidden. Normally a new user has access only to the GridSphere group but may join additional groups via the "Profile Manager" portlet in the Welcome=>Settings tab. Users may immediately join any groups that are public on the portal. If the group is private, then the user has the option to request group submission from the portal administrator by sending an email request. If the group is hidden, then the group is not displayed to the user for approval and will require explicit addition by a portal administrator.

A user that is granted the ADMIN role level, an administrator, when logged in will also have access to the "Group Manager" portlet. An administrator has the capability to add and remove users to the group they are administrator of as well as creating and editing groups on the portal.

The "Edit default groups" button allows you to select default groups that new users will be subscribed to. This makes it easy for administrators to ensure that newly created users will see the portlets offered them by the chosen groups.

The Administration=>Portlets tab displays the "Portlet Application Manager" portlet that displays the status of all known portlet groups. An admin may stop or restart a portlet group as well as deploy new portlet web applications to the portal. These features use the Tomcat manager web application to perform web application reloading and initialization. If the portlet web application is a GridSphere/WebSphere application then reloading will not work if the application contains any portlet services, since the service classes that are deployed to $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib may not be restarted by the manager web application. In this case, the best is to redeploy the portlet application from the command line. If the portlet application is JSR compliant, then redeploying the webapp via the "Portlet Application Manager" should work fine since all classes including service classes are contained within the classloader of the webapp and no classes are deployed to $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib.

The Administration=>Layouts tab offers the "Layout Manager Portlet" that allows an administrator to modify the layout of a particular group. Currently, the layout descriptor must be hand edited in the text area and then saved. The changes will take place when a user logs out and logs back in. This offers a simple yet effective way to edity the guest user layout or the layouts of defined groups. In addition, the banner of the portal may be edited allowing an admin to modify the portal header including logo and title information. The defualt theme may be selected such that new users or users that have not selected a theme will see the selected default theme.

By default, GridSphere uses the error page located in $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/gridsphere/jsp/errors/custom_error.jsp to render a portlet when an error occurs. By default this page displays the stack trace to make development easier. However, for production usage, this file should possibly be modified to display a comprehensible error message to end users.