Part I: Configuring OC4J Applications (i.e. BI Publisher) to work in Single Sign-On (SSO) Environment on IIS DECEMBER 7TH, 2010. Michal

The full topic of this article is a two part post; today I will explain how to enable the SSO mechanism for the OC4J native applications used in OBI architecture. An example of this would be BI Publisher.
I recently posted an article on how to set up OBIEE on IIS with SSO; this article is a continuation on this topic. OBI and its “analytics” application can be seamlessly deployed on IIS. However, there are some other applications in the OBI stack that don’t have this functionality. To give an example, BI Publisher or MS Office Add-in – by default can only be deployed on an OC4J Web Application server (or be a part of a wider Oracle Application Server architecture).

Business Case:
In the Windows Server dominated environment, OBIEE is likely to be deployed on an IIS application server. It is possible that the SSO solution will be requested by a client to facilitate the access of the tool.
The goal is to achieve a seamless, secure and reliable SSO solution across all the BI applications in the OBIEE stack; achieving this depends on the architecture used. In this case we will use an environment based on an IIS web application server (i.e. Windows Server based infrastructure).
In my last blog article I mentioned how to ‘deploy’ OBI analytics applications; but apart from the basic application, we will need another tool such as BI Publisher which functions with SSO.  We do not simply want users to re-type their credentials anytime they access Publisher reports. Ultimately users should be able to see all applications working seamlessly while passing credentials in the shared SSO infrastructure.
The solution:
In order to implement SSO for OC4J based applications, which need to communicate with IIS, we will build a ‘bridge’ between IIS and OC4J application servers; a tool called Oracle Proxy will allow us to do that.
While researching I found this link (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B25221_05/web.1013/b25211/proxy.htm#i647932) for anyone interested in detailed information.
In principle we will build a plug-in to our IIS system and enable a seamless logging scheme into BI Publisher.
The steps to follow are:
· Install and configure Oracle Proxy
· Modify OBI Presentation Server configuration files (credentialstore.xml, instanceconfig.xml)
· Modify BI Publisher configuration files (xmlp-server-config.xml)
· Adjust security settings

The steps to follow are:

Install and configure Oracle Proxy

Modify OBI Presentation Server configuration files (credentialstore.xml, instanceconfig.xml)

Modify BI Publisher configuration files (xmlp-server-config.xml)

Adjust security settings

Benefits:
Using the above solution we achieve the following:
· Shared SSO mechanism for all OBI applications across an OBI instance
· No need to install additional architecture elements (like OAS)
· Relatively straight-forward implementation steps
Stay tuned! In the next blog article I will explain a deep dive into the integration process with detailed steps.

Java Host Server Usage

Sometime back I was under the impression that the Java Host server is only used for displaying Charts,Graphs and all those flashy images, but, after the below incident I found one more usage of the Java Host server.

Today, I had a requirement to create some reports in BI Publisher. When I logged in to OBIEE and tried to access BI Publisher from More Products then I got the below error:

“An error occurred during execution of “connect“. No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”

I was amazed when I got this idiotic error as I just did a fresh OBIEE install. Another interesting thing was that I was able to access the BI Publisher Standalone application and was able to login into the application successfully.

When I read the error, it said ‘target machine refused to connect’ which meant the server is shut down but that was not the case as I was able to login in standalone application. So, this thing brought up more confusions.

After all this confusion, I went and checked all the servers and found that except Java Host server all the servers were started. So, just as a trial I started the Java Host Server and to my surprize my problem got resolved.

I think this post might not be that helpful for some people but it can avoid you from wasting some time.

Resetting the OC4J password in OBIEE

We recently had to uninstall the OBIEE installation on our development server but unfortunately noone remembered the password in the team. After some reasearch we were able to figure out a way to reset the OC4J Admin password.

Open up the file ORACLE_HOME\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\config\system-jazn-data.xml in a text editor.

Find the line that defines the credentials property for the admin user

Enter the new password prefixed by an exclamation mark between the credentials tag e.g. – ” !newpassword “

Start the services and you should be able to uninstall OBIEE with the new password.

<user>
<name>oc4jadmin</name>
<display-name>OC4J Administrator</display-name>
<guid>0E645260306811DCBFEA1DBAFA3DF35A</guid>
<description>OC4J Administrator</description>
<credentials>{903}MnAD+UUULZVKTheGctZt+WWD8IYOmYh/</credentials>
</user>

Replace the existing encrypted password with the new password.

Be sure to prefix the password with an exclamation point (!). For example:
<credentials>!newpassword</credentials>

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3/2 – Creating Windows Service for BI EE OC4J

Update: Just realized Adrian has already blogged about this here. Thanks to Adrian for pointing it out.

Thanks to Matt Bedin and Dave Granholm(BI EE product management) for sharing this. This has been asked so many times before both in internal as well as external forums. So, i thought i would blog about it for the benefit of others. Just remember that, this method is not supported as yet by Oracle. As you would know, when you do a default install of BI EE, it would install OC4J which would act as a web server. This OC4J would start automatically when you start your OS and you can see the OC4J console in your system tray. Now, how do we go about converting this OC4J start/stop command script into a windows service? In order to do this, we would need an excellent Open Source Utility called JavaService-2.0.10. You can download this from here. Once you have downloaded this, unzip the utility to any folder.

      

Now, navigate to this folder from command line and enter the following command.

javaservice -install “Oracle BI EE OC4J” “C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_11\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll” -XX:MaxPermSize=128m “-Djava.class.path=D:\Oracle\OracleBI\OC4J_BI\j2ee\home\oc4j.jar” -start oracle.oc4j.loader.boot.BootStrap -description “Oracle BI EE OC4J Service”

In the above command, C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_11\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll points to the dll in your Java 1.5 JDK path. Also, D:\Oracle\OracleBI\OC4J_BI\j2ee\home\oc4j.jar points to the oc4j.jar within your BI EE instance.

      

Now, if you go to the Windows Services Manager, you would notice that a new service would have been created.

      

Now, you should be able to the control the start/stop of OC4J from the services console. Use this only on a test instance since this is not certified.

OBI Tips & Tricks: recover a forgotten oc4jadmin password

Have you ever made the mistake of forgetting your OC4J administrative password when installing OBIEE? It's happened to many of us and here is a great solution originally from David Kwan that can help you reset your password in a few minutes. I can't claim this as my own but have used this several times to help clients recover from any non-documented installs of OBIEE on their servers.

So here's the secret from Oracle Technical Support to reset it.

Please use following steps to reset your password:

1. Navigate to the <oc4j_root>/j2ee/home/config directory
2. Backup the file: system-jazn-data.xml for restore or later reference
3. Edit the file: system-jazn-data.xml
Locate the following entries:

<user><name>oc4jadmin</name><display-name>OC4J Administrator</display-name><description>OC4J Administrator</description><credentials>{903} MMGWnYKcnMKBBOR1LroHHrQpy3zmVbGEohN4aUSjxK4=</credentials></user>

and add the XML attribute deactivated="true", as shown below:

<user deactivated="true"><name>oc4jadmin</name><display-name>OC4J Administrator</display-name><description>OC4J Administrator</description><credentials>{903} MMGWnYKcnMKBBOR1LroHHrQpy3zmVbGEohN4aUSjxK4=</credentials></user>
When you next start the oc4j instance using "oc4j -start" the container will re-prompt you for the password and add the newly encrypted password to the <credentials> tag in the oc4jadmin entry.

How to change the default OC4J port number 9704 to port number 80

If you choose to install the BASIC Oracle BI EE or install Oracle BI SE One, then for the actual running BI applications use the Oracle Container for Java (OC4J). The port on which OC4J listens to the default value of the 9704th This value can sometimes be problematic. Eg. if you want to go to BI customers / partners who are not in your network - ie, access via the Internet. In many cases it is only allowed on the firewall port 80 (the other ports can not log on) and process permits a port on the firewall in some organizations is almost impossible. If you want OC4J to reset a port as the most commonly used port number 80, then just edit a set of configuration files and restart OC4J, BI Server and BI PresentationEckhardt. 

Forgot your password oc4jadmin

If you want to uninstall Windows EE/SE-1 Oracle BI, you are asked for admin password (oc4jadmin) Oracle Container for Java. If you forgot your password, then you can not uninstall correctly ( ... but do not despair, forgotten password, see the Start> All Programs> Oracle Business Intelligence> Stop OC4J> Properties:) Note the operation of the security perspective - you have to Selection:

• delete icon "Stop OC4J" and create a full Windows to start and stop OC4J in the background, the process can be found here
• use the full Oracle Application Server or other certified AS list can be found here