Portal Home Page Displays Error : Error getting content for remote pagelet.

When you are logging on to a Portal Home Page which displays Remote pagelets, You get this error randomly.

Error Message: Error getting content

When you click on "Detailed Error Description", You will get this

Unable to get document

Error occurred while accessing target page.

To see the further details, Please log in to your webserver and open the following log files. If you have more than 1 web server you may have to go to each web server to see the content.


Log File Location : $PS_CFG_HOME/webserv/peoplesoft/servers/PIA/logs (This is for PeopleTools 8.53 and higher).
Log File Names are below
PIA_servlets0.log.0
PIA_servlets1.log.0
PIA_servlets2.log.0


If you open any one of these log file, You will see the following


2000-01-07T11:47:21.185         9259 163517125      unknown SEVERE psft.pt8.psp logError Error for User: abc Error Message: Unable to get document:  Requested URL: https://abc.com Target URL:  Error reading from server


Resolution:
If you do not have security issue or single signon issue, Please check the default HTTP Header size allowed by your Load balancer that you use for multiple webservers.  In Case of Cisco ACE Loadbalancer default is : 4096 bytes. Increasing it to 32768 helps in resolving this issue.


For Cisco Ace this parameter is :

set header-maxparse-length 32768

If you use a different Load balancer for e.g. F5 LTM then I believe the default is already 32768.  You can contact your Load balancer vendor to determine the default HTTP Header size.

User does not see a Pagelet on a HomePage

Even though user has a access to Pagelet, he does not see it on a HomePage. This indicates that WebServer Pagelet cache is corrupt. Only way to make it work correctly is to restart the webserver. But if this happens in the middle of a day, you can use this trick to force the webserver Homepage pagelet cache refresh.

Add a new page to Homepage tab as a required fix. (PeopleTools –> Portal –> Structure and Content –> Portal Objects –> HomePage –> Tabs – Home).

Go to the Tab Content Tab and add the new Pagelet as require fix and select the column, usually the last column. Save it and relogin with user id who is complaining that he is not able to see the pagelet. He should now see the missing pagelet. Remove the newly added pagelet, as it is no longer needed. You can use the following sql to determine what pagelet user has access to .

 

SELECT * FROM PSPRUHTABPGLT where oprid = '7420060' ORDER BY portal_col_num,portal_row_num;

 

For further reference, Go to MOS (My Oracle Support) and see the following resolution.

E-PORTAL: What Are The Tables Used By Portal Technology? [ID 651342.1]