I just lost an hour of my life chasing down an issue that could have been avoided.
Back story: having some problems with BI Publisher in a legacy install of OBIEE 10g. did some port configuration in the Enterprise Manager Console and did some bouncing with opmnctl. I had some port conflicts (d’oh, fat fingers) and had to force iAS to come up on a non-default port to back out/adjust some of the port changes. No big whoop. Then, I tried bringing everything up and saw no errors, EM came up just fine, the apps all had green arrows…but nothing would load. The browser would just say “waiting” while trying to hit the OBIEE application. I brought everything down again, and back up again and the same thing happened. I started digging through the config screens to make sure that I didn’t miss anything.
Then I decided to bring everything down and issue a ps -ef | grep [username] and saw that I had an old sawserver (OBIEE web server) process hanging around. Killed it…brought everything back up, and we were back in business.
Moral of the story: If you bring everything down to fix a bigger problem, make sure everything is indeed down before bringing the stack back up.