IBM HTTP Server not starting - http_plugin.log excess size

I just happened to come across the following error:

I'm using IBM HTTP Server 7 with WAS Plugin configured. the following behavior was observed - after attempting to start IHS with 

<IHS_INSTALL_ROOT>/bin/apachectl start

control returns to shell, as it should. But when I checked if IHS is up and running with

nestat -an | grep <portnumber>

it didn't show desired port listening, however when looking for httpd processes with:

ps -ef | grep httpd

showed all necessary httpd jobs (namely, 4 of them). That is a problem symptom.

This was the second time I came across that, so I knew what to do. The clue is http_plugin.log file size: when it grows over 2147483647 bytes (on Linux), OS is no longer able to write to it, and despite seemingly successful startup of the server. So, you just need to remove (or move to other place if you need it) this file, and try to start IHS again, it will recreate it and work fine. The log file is located in <PLUGIN_ROOT>/logs/<Servername>/http_plugin.log

If you happen to see this malfunction, review your WAS plugin LogLevel settings. Remeber that on Trace or Detail level it generates fairly lot of entries and log grows very quickly. If your system is working fine and you don't have any sophisticated file log monitoring implemented, just change it to Info or Warn - it will be sufficient and your log file won't clog up.

Good luck,  thanks for comments and feedback!

WebSphere SOAP message trace (XML, JAX-WS)

Okay, there are numerous articles on how to trace XML SOAP messages sent to websphere server, but it seems all of them address some different scenario I am in. Eg. they involve custom development or code-changing in order to add handlers and so on.

What I needed was to simply dump content of SOAP messages incoming to my http inbound channel. However, anything less than wssecurity.*=all given no SOAP content, so I started to drill down to the very one I needed. Finally I found some least fraction of WAS framework to check if you want to get incoming XML content, out of WSSecurityHandler class. As XML parsing involves security processing, you simply need to use the following trace:

com.ibm.ws.wssecurity.handler.*=finest 

in addition to the one you already have set.

Good Luck, I wish you happy tracing!