Managing portals

Creating a portal

The first portal is created in the Farm Manager during portal installation and configuration. After that, additional portals can be created in either the Farm Manager or the Portal Manager. Instructions are provided in the portal administration guide.

Updating a portal

When updating a portal, most changes are not hot safe, unless the Make configuration changes Hot Safe option is selected on the Session Initialization tab under Portal Configuration in the Portal Manager.

Changes to the IPF instance name and protocol (only when port is standard 80/443) can also be hot safe if URL rewrite is used. For more information about URL rewrite, see the portal installation guide.

To update a portal without affecting users, you could create a test portal and view the changes. When they are approved, export the new configuration and import it into the production portal.

Bringing down a portal

Bringing down a portal is hot safe.

This action causes the portal to stop accepting new sessions. The portal status is set to Suspending, and existing sessions are unaffected.

The Monitor_SessionsForPortal job, which monitors for existing sessions on the portal, is created. The Runner field on the Farm Manager, Farm Jobs form is updated with information about the number of sessions still active. When the count reaches 0, this job sets the portal status to Down and the job completes.

Forcing down a portal

Forcing down a portal is not hot safe.

This action stops accepting new sessions and ends all existing sessions for the portal. First the status is set to Suspending, indicating that no new sessions should be accepted. The ending of existing sessions runs asynchronously. The portal entry in the IPFControl database is locked. The End_SessionsForPortal job is created, which ends all sessions for this portal. After all sessions have been ended, the status is set to Down.

You can select this action for a portal that is already in a Suspending state because of a previous Bring Down Portal action. It marks any existing Monitor_SessionsForPortal jobs as Complete.

Bringing up a portal

Bringing up a portal is hot safe.

This action starts accepting new sessions. The portal status is set to Up.

You can select this action for a portal that is in a Suspending or Down state. It marks any existing Monitor_SessionsForPortal jobs as Complete.

Deleting a portal

Deleting a portal is not hot safe.

This action stops all sessions and stops accepting requests. The process runs asynchronously. The portal entry in the IPFControl Database is locked. The asynchronous Retract_BindingFromIPFInstance job, which completes the removal of the portal on all servers in the farm, may be created if the host name has Uses Rewrite selected and either of these conditions is true:

• The port is not 80/443 and no other portal uses this host name and port combination.
• The host name does not have a default IPF instance and the port is 80/443 and no other portal uses this host name and port.

During the asynchronous update, the portal status indicates that an update is in progress. When complete, the Farm Manager indicates that the portal has been removed and the portal is deleted from the IPFControl Database.

The end result is that site bindings for the IPF instance may have been removed, if no other portal needs them. Also, if the portal was using a URL rewrite tool, the rewrite rules may need to be removed manually. For more information about URL rewrite, see the portal installation guide.

Adding portal administrator or developer users or groups

This action provides Is Administrator permissions, so users can access the Portal Manager for a specified portal. Steps are provided in the portal administration guide.

Launching the Portal Manager or browsing a portal

You can launch the Portal Manager for a selected portal or open the selected portal in a browser window using the links on this form.