SAP CERTIFICATION EXAMS DURING 2010 -- READ ON!!

LISTEN UP, NORTH AMERICA -- IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO TAKE ANY SAP CERTIFICATION EXAMS DURING 2010 -- READ ON!!


SAP is listening to the LinkedIn voices for your certification goals during 2010, SAP Education NA has created a promotion code to be used exclusively by the SAP LinkedIn communities at our exam delivery partner, Pearson VUE. Here are the details:

PROMOTION CODE: 10CERTLI

VALIDITY PERIOD: June 1 – December 31, 2010

TO BE USED AT: Pearson VUE only ( http://www.pearsonvue.com/sap/ ) - this promotion does NOT apply to certification exams taken at SAP delivery locations.

DETAILS: 50% off ALL certification exams taken at North American Pearson VUE locations

IMPORTANT: The promotion code allows for unlimited exams throughout the validity period. As such, you can use the promotion code multiple times if needed.

Certification ensures quality and competence. It communicates an externally verified and industry-standard mark of excellence.



Why Organizations Need Certification

Certified individuals mitigate business risks by ensuring that your project is completed accurately and on time. In addition, investment in certification and training yields a strong ROI on software investment and an exponential increase in productivity. And finally, certification provides a clear measurement of your organization’s current skill set and allows you to better plan and act on future training initiatives.

Questions??? Contact Ken Schieffer at kenneth.schieffer@sap.com.

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Fixing the 401.1 Access Denied Error

This is classic example of why the .NET InfoView will not work with Kerberos and Windows AD authentication along with NTLM. Although one makes sure that all installation and settings are done as per the book, .NET InfoView gives “Access Denied … 401.1 …” and this is specific to IIS 6.0 and might not apply to IIS 5.1 or less.

By default, the NTAuthenticationProviders metabase property is not defined when you install IIS 6.0. IIS 6.0 uses the Negotiate, NTLM parameter when the NTAuthenticationProviders metabase property is not defined. To verify,

• Open the command prompt (Click Start, then click Run and type in CMD) and change the directory to c:\Inetpub\Adminscripts
• Then run this command: cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/NTAuthenticationProviders
• It is suppose to give this output:

          NTAuthenticationProviders : (STRING) "NTLM"

         But you’ll get this.

Fig 01 - Adminscripts contents

This means that you cannot use IIS to use NTLM as your authentication mechanism if you want to use Integrated Windows authentication only.

Now you will have to force IIS to use NTLM as your authentication mechanism if you want to use Integrated Windows authentication only if you have multiple application pools that run under different domain user accounts.

Now run this command: cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/NTAuthenticationProviders "NTLM"

Fig 02 - NTLM Assignment

The screen will show the assignment of “NTLM” to NTAuthenticationProviders

This solution is provided by Microsoft under KB215383

One can also delete the negotiation of NTLM by running the command cscript adsutil.vbs DELETE

Other help commands are given under this: cscript adsutil.vbs help

I hope that this will be useful to someone. Comments and corrections are welcome.

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Fix for log4j warning message in the Tomcat log file stdout.log

I was getting these warning messages in the logs file stdout.log while trying to debug the Kerberos login issues on Java InfoView. Not that this was disruptive by any means, but I thought I should lower the logs size. I’m working on BO XI R2 on Windows 2003 with Tomcat.

INFO: Installing web application at context path /dswsbobje from URL file:C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\webapps\dswsbobje log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase). log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

These messages indicate that listed web application file dswsbobje was unable to find the log4j.war file in its location which was supposed to be deployed universally at the time of installation and apparently did not.

A note on what log4j is? log4j is a popular logging package for Java and is used for debugging Java applications. With log4j it is possible to enable logging at runtime without modifying the application binary. The package is distributed under the Apache Software License, a fully-fledged open source license certified by the open source initiative. The link http://logging.apache.org/log4j/docs/manual.html gives pretty good information on different aspects of log4j properties. The output from Log4j can go to the console, but it can also go to an email server, a database table, a log file (as in my case here), or various other destinations. This link gives the FAQ’s about log4j file: http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/faq.html#a1.1 In my case here, I have created a folder WINNT on C:\ drive and created a file bscLogin.conf to enable Windows AD authentication using Kerberos for Java InfoView. Enabling trace in this file will provide logs for tracing any untoward login issues.

How to enable trace to follow Kerberos login attempt activities

Open the file bscLogin.conf from C:\WINNT in notepad. Append debug=true as shown below to debug the Kerberos login issues.

FIG 01 – Appending debug to file bscLogin.conf

The output of this will be logged at this default location C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\logs\ and the log file name will be stdout.log

The Fix

There were some other messages warning for deployed WAR files dswsbobjewar.xml and jsfadminwar.xml. So to have Tomcat use file log4j.jar universally, I copied the files log4j.jar and commons-logging.jar from the Java library folder C:\Program Files\Business Objects\common\3.5\java\lib\external to the Tomcat lib folder C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\common\lib

Then, this is the result of the Tomcat log file (stdout.log) that has size of 1 KB. I had to delete the stdout.log file first and then restart the Tomcat Service.

FIG 02 - Location of the log file

As per Tomcat forum documentation, some warning messages may persist but they don’t seem to be any reason for Kerberos not authenticating.

I hope this will be helpful to someone.

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.NET InfoView Login Fix

An error comes on the browser “The Page cannot be found" after trying to logon to .NET InfoView URL http://SERVER.DOMAIN.COM/InfoViewApp/logon.aspx after configuring it. Now I have Java InfoView configured on Tomcat and it works fine.


Here I’m giving the fix for this matrix: Business Objects Enterprise XI 3.1 installed on Windows 2003 server with MS SQL Server 2005 Database on a different server.

I made sure that I have all settings in place except a different ASP.NET version I found. I have 3 Web Service Extensions and that does not include ASP.NET v2.1

Fig 01 – Web Service Extensions in IIS

BusinessObjects Enterprise supports Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP) and .NET applications (ASP.NET), allowing an organization to use and develop custom web applications for its preferred web application server and operating system platforms.

The default option is to install the Tomcat Java web application server and ASP.NET extensions, so you can utilize both technologies on the same server.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) .NET web application server InfoView is supported on Microsoft Information Server (IIS), and, when detected, the BusinessObjects Enterprise setup program will automatically install and deploy InfoView to IIS.

InfoView uses .NET web components (framework and reporting services) to integrate with BusinessObjects Enterprise. ASP.NET is part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, a computing environment that simplifies application development in the highly distributed environment of the Internet.


In order to fix this I added the Web Service I needed by following these steps:
 

Fig 02 – Adding Web Service Extension

1) From inetmgr, expand Internet Information Services (6IIS) manager

2) Click on Web Service Extensions
3) Click Add a new Web service extension…
4) Click on Add
5) Browse to this location C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ and select this file aspnet_isapi.dll and click OK
6) Give the Extension Name as ASP.NET v2.0.50727
7) Check Set extension status to allow and then click OK

Now the added Web Service Extension was listed. I restarted the IIS and then tried opening the .NET InfoView and it worked just fine.

Similar solution is also provided in SAP Note 1320325 but with different configuration.


Please add comments and/or corrections. I hope this will be helpful to someone.

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