OHS Troubleshooting on multiple servers

Large Environment OHS Configuration in 11.1.2.3

Running Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) on multiple servers helps environments run faster, be more stable and allows the environment to continue running if one server goes down. However, configuration and customization have always been made more difficult as a result. Every server added means repeating the steps and changes. When you run the Configuration Utility to make a change, it’s easy to forget you have to repeat it on every server running OHS.
A new feature in 11.1.2.3 helps with this. You have the option to use a shared drive to save OHS configuration files on. If you select this option, the files are shared by all OHS servers to that location. That means you make the change once and it’s reflected on all servers – you only have to restart services and the servers will all use the same information.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind if you want to use this feature, though:

• It only works right if you select it the very first time it asks on the first OHS configuration. Trying to change it to a shared drive later doesn’t currently work. Oracle is aware of this limitation and reports they are working to address it
• If you plan to “silo” your services via OHS configuration, this is not the option for you
• After making a change on one server, you still need to restart the OHS service on all other servers for it to take effect
• If you manually modify configuration files, keep in mind that all servers now use the same file, so if you add an entry for a local file system, it needs to exist on all OHS servers in the same location

This feature can help keep changes simple and centralized on large environment installs. This will help reduce cases where one server acts one way and another acts entirely different because of a missed configuration or typo in a file.