All about that Internal 500 error

We amateurs have faced many a times this cumbersome Internal 500 error while accessing maximo URL. Well, I have faced it many times. So I would like to share my experience and hopefully somebody might get some help while troubleshooting.

When you try to open the maximo url and it is really frustrating to see the Internal 500 error. We all know that this is definitely related to database connection. Don't lose your head and check the following:

1. Database password might have expired. Try to connect to the database instance with your credentials, if it says password expired, reset the password (with DBA's help if needed) and restart your server.
2. In case above step does not help you, check if configdb is running or admin mode is ON.
• Run the SQL query "select varvalue from maxvars where varname='CONFIGURING'", if it returns 1, update varvalue to 0.
• Run the SQL query "select vavalue from maxvars where varname='ADMINRESTART'", if it returns ON, update varvalue to OFF.

I know most of us have already figured out the above obvious checks by now. But I had run into 500 error beyond this too. The maximo.ear file was rebuilt and redeployed. After the server was restarted, we were ready to see the wonders our Java code has created but instead we were shown an Internal 500 error. We double and triple checked for password expiry, running configdb or admin mode ON, but could not track our culprit. Here the problem was encrypted password.

So the resolution steps followed in this case are:

1. From the folder path [IBMSMP]\maximo\applications\maximo\properties, open the file maximo.properties. Modify the file with mxe.db.password=<database password> and set mxe.encrypted=false.
2. Run the command encryptproperties.bat from [IBMSMP]\maximo\tools\maximo path.
3. Rebuild the maximo.ear file and redeploy it. Restart the server.

Hopefully, you will be rid of Internal 500 error by now.