Something hitting your database?

If you have a corporate policy that passwords must expire after a period and no exception is made for system accounts like the database administrator password.  Changing the password can be a pain. However, if you are using WebSphere on an XA datasource, you might get invalid logon attempts even after you changed all the passwords in JAAS config and/or LDAP (and in bad cases within your application).  The reason for this may be a left over transaction.  It appears as a single line in the logs when you start up the application server, and it is really difficult to find. The left over transaction doesn't recognize the password and constantly tries to complete itself with the old one.  It will keep on trying no matter what and you will eventually your database ID locked out. However, the solution is quite simple assuming you are willing to ignore the lost transaction.  There is a directory called tranlog in the WAS_HOME directory.  Stop the servers in your cell, rename the directory to something else (as a backup), then create a new tranlog directory and add subdirectories for each server in your cell. When you restart the application server it will not try to redo the transaction.