GroupWise 2012 WebAccess shows grey screen instead of login page

  • 7011684
  • 23-Jan-2013
  • 23-Jan-2013

Environment

Novell Groupwise 2012 WebAccess
Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Situation

After an upgrade to GroupWise 2012.x WebAccess, when users go to http://server.com/gw/webacc they see only a grey screen instead of the WebAccess login page.
The Tomcat 6 log file at c:\Novell\tomcat6\logs\stderr_YYYYMMDD will show an error during the extraction of the gw.war file, similar to this:
INFO: Deploying web application archive gw.war
Jan 22, 2013 4:02:44 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina stopServer
SEVERE: Catalina.stop: 
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect

Resolution

During the upgrade process, the installer will write a file called gw.war (which is a compressed file containing the updated WebAccess files) to the c:\Novell\tomcat6\webapps\ directory.  When you launch Tomcat 6 for the first time after the upgrade, it will extract the contents of that file to update the WebAccess components.  The grey screen problem happens because Tomcat 6 had problems extracting the contents of the new gw.war file.

To resolve the issue:
1. Stop the Tomcat 6 service (if running)
2. Delete the c:\Novell\tomat6\webapps\gw folder
3. Rename the file c:\Novell\tomcat6\webapps\gw.war file to gw.zip
4. Using Windows Explorer or Winzip, extract the contents of the gw.zip file, which should recreate the c:\Novell\tomat6\webapps\gw folder
5. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the c:\Novell\tomat6\webapps\gw\webaccess\YYYYMMDD1234\js folder (the name of the YYYYMMDD1234 folder will vary depending on which build you are running) and verify that there are files in that directory.  If the extraction failed, that directory will not contain any files.
6. Start the Tomcat 6 service.