How can a user change password without having Admin privilege?

Users can change their OBIEE passwords without having Administrator privilege…follow the below steps to achieve it.

1. Copy controlmessages.xml from C:\OracleBI\web\msgdb\messages to C:\OracleBI\web\msgdb\ customMessages directory.





2. Open the copied version i.e. from C:\OracleBI\web\msgdb\ customMessages directory.



3. Uncomment the above selected line of HTML code and save the file.

4. Restart the OBIEE Services

5. Log in as a user who wants to change his/her password, click “My Account”, a popup will open and there will be link to change password.



6. Click on “Change password” to change the password.

Changing Administrator Password in OBIEE

Sorry for the delay as I was busy in some assignments of mine which had to be taken up on priority. Today we changed the Administrator Password for OBIEE, BI Publisher and Scheduler so, thought to share the same with you.

We can change the Administrator password by using the following steps:

1) We need to create a superuser in BI Publisher so that we can log into the application using the Superuser credentials and change the Administrator password.

2) Take a backup of the file “c:\OracleBI\xmlp\XMLP\Admin\Configuration\xmlp-server-config.xml”.

3) Log into BI Publisher and navigate to Admin > Security Center > Security Configuration

4) Enable a Local Superuser and put in the Superuser name and password(eg: Username-admin Password-admin1) and click apply.

5) Now restart the oc4j services.

6) Try Signing into BI Publisher(standalone application) as  admin/admin1(superuser) and you should be successfully logged into the application.

7) Navigate to Admin > Security Center > Security Configuration and change the Administrator Password in the Security Model to the new password ( eg: admin123)

8 ) Navigate to Admin/JDBC Connection and click the Oracle BI EE link.Change the password for the Administrator user there and write the new password(admin123). This is used because when we use Oracle BI EE as source for the reports then, it establishes the connection with OBIEE using these credentials.

9) Also navigate to Admin/Integration/ Oracle BI Presentation Services and change the Administrator password there also(admin123).

10) Open the OBIEE Repository in Online mode and change the password for the Administrator to the new password eg: admin123.

11) Shut down the servers and oc4j.

12) Run the cryptotools utility which will modify the credentialstore.xml for BI Publisher and Scheduler(As required for Administrator user).
Cryptotools just a general purpose utility for the manipulation of the credential store XML file (OracleBIData/web/config/credentialstore.xml). The credentialstore.xml is used by the Presentation Services to communicate with other BI Components (BI Scheduler [aka Delivers] and BI Publisher). Once the Presentation Services contacts the other BI Component, the BI Component will use the credentials provided by the Presentation Services to authenticate the user against the BI Server. The reason this was implemented this way it’s due to the fact that in most large installations the Presentation Services will reside on a different box than the BI Scheduler [aka Delivers] or BI Publisher hence the connection between the services needs to be authenticated.

13)  Configure the scheduler using the ‘schconfig’ on UNIX box.

1 – Configure Scheduler

>>> Enter Choice: 1

***** Scheduler Configuration *****
1 – Database
2 – General
3 – Advanced
0 – Quit

>>> Enter Choice: 2

***** Scheduler General Configuration *****
10 – Administrator Name : Administrator
11 – Administrator Password : *****
0 – Quit

>>> Enter Choice: 10, then 11

0 – Quit
0 – Quit
0 – Quit

14) Now, start all the servers and oc4j so that the changes can take effect.

15) Try logging into the application using the new Administrator credentials. it should log in successfully.

16) Try to navigate to BI Publisher from OBIEE and it should navigate without any errors.

Follow the above mentioned steps in the defined order. Hope it works fine for you.

Post your comments in case you face nay issues…

Forgot password for OBIEE rpd (or) Resetting Admin Tool password

During my R&D work today, i come across a situation how to reset the password for rpd where I forgot the old password. All existed solutions (like NQSChangepassword.exe command) have associated with mentioning old password to get the new one.

The work around I found:

1. Open NQSConfig.INI file

2. Go to Security part and find AUTHENTICATION_TYPE = BYPASS_NQS;

3. Uncomment (remove #) this part.

4. Stop the BI Server service

5. Close Administration Tool, if opened. (Then only the changes are affecting to the Administration Tool)

6. Open Administration Tool, then rpd which needs password reset, in offline mode

7. Give any password, it accepts.

8. Now go to Manage > Security.

9. From here it’s the normal process how you change password.

10. Save the changes to rpd

11. Revert back the changes in NQSConfig.INI

12. Start BI Server and open rpd with new password.

I am not aware of whether it is this bug or something else. And there is also a way to do this using Import from Repository. But this is deprecated option. Of course, i found that my approach is an easy way and not time consuming process 

This is the work around I found for resetting password of rpd.

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3/2 – Automating Passwords Resets – nqschangepassword.exe utility

Though many of you might be aware of the simple utility called as nqschangepassword.exe, i thought this deserves a special mention here since it can serve as an automation utility to change the passwords/reset the passwords etc. You can find this utility under {OracleBI}\Server\Bin directory. As the name suggests, it helps in changing the passwords of the users in the Repository without opening the repository. The syntax for using this utility is

nqschangepassword.exe -d <data source name> -u <user name> -p <password> -n <new password> [-w <ssl passphrase> | -y]

For example,

nqschangepassword.exe -d AnalyticsWeb -u Administrator -p Administrator -n welcome1

      

This utility can be used in combination with DBMS_SCHEDULER and UTL_SMTP packages to automate the process of resetting the passwords and sending those passwords out to the end users. A very simple and very handy utility. We shall see the multitude of uses this utility can be put through in future blog entries.

How to Get UserID and Password

On OTN this question asked. Question is how to get current UserID and Password on a Report, to address this here I'm posting this blog so that it will be help full to other people as well.

In Reporting we can get userid by using function 'USER()' but there is no flexibility on how to get password

To get password we need to do little trick as shown below.

Create new session initialization block with sql query as

select ':USER',':PASSWORD' from dual

And assign these values to session variables, example GetUser, GetPassword

access these session variables on report by VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.GetUser) or VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.GetPassword) respectively.

How to reset/change the ‘Administrator’ password in OBIEE, BI Publisher and BI Scheduler

We would like to reset the ‘Administrator’ password for:

i) ‘OBIEE’
ii) ‘BI Publisher’ and
iii) ‘BI Scheduler’

Please provide a solution to perform a password reset.
Solution

The steps to perform this task are below.

The example solution begins by creating a BI Publisher superuser.

On both OBIEE and BI Publisher.

Start username/password:    Administrator/Administrator
After username/password    Administrator/admin3

BI Publisher superuser username/password admin2/admin2

After the test I also proved you could log into OBIEE and click on the preconfigured Dashboard.

Please follow the exact steps below and create the same usernames and passwords to start off with.

1. Take a backup copy of the

c:\OracleBI\xmlp\XMLP\Admin\Configuration\xmlp-server-config.xml

file.
2. Log into BI Publisher
3. Select Admin > Security Center > Security Configuration
4. Enable a Local Superuser called: admin2 with the password admin2
. Click <Apply>

5. Restart oc4j
6. Sign into BI Publisher as  admin2/admin2
This should log in successfully.

7. Log into OBIEE Admintool (Online) and change the Administrator password to ‘admintool’.
8. Check in and save the changes.
9. Log into OBIEE Answers as Administrator/admin3

10. Change the ‘Administrator’ password under the ‘Security Model’ to ‘admin3′. Click <Apply>
11. Restart oc4j
12. Login to BI Publisher as Administrator/admin3
This should log in successfully.

13. Log into OBIEE Answers as Administrator/admin3
14. Click on More Products > BI Publisher
15. This should go straight through to BI Publisher without prompting for a username and password.

If the above method still fails attach your c:\OracleBI\xmlp\XMLP\Admin\Configuration\xmlp-server-config.xml file for comparison. I would expect the encrypted password strings to exactly match my environment.

** BI Scheduler password **

This password can be changed in ’schconfig’ from the DOS/UNIX command line/shell.
C:\>schconfig
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Oracle Corporation, All rights reserved

***** Delivers Configuration Menu *****
1 – Configure Scheduler

>>> Enter Choice: 1

***** Scheduler Configuration *****
1 – Database
2 – General
3 – Advanced
0 – Quit

>>> Enter Choice:

>>> Enter Choice: 2

***** Scheduler General Configuration *****
10 – Administrator Name : Administrator
11 – Administrator Password : *****
0 – Quit

>>> Enter Choice: 10, then 11

0 – Quit
0 – Quit
0 – Quit

Quit 3 times and restart all Analytics Services (to bring them back in sync – restarting the BI Scheduler on its own also works, but Job Manager connections may exhibit stale behaviour depending on what has been changed) .