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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Tip of the Day: Diagnosis in SM12

I will be adding a new topic under the heading Tip of the Day. This is one is given to me by Yahya Dossary, a Senior Operating System Specialist, a colleague and a good friend at my workplace. This is printed with his permission with some added notes from me.


T/C is used for displaying and deleting locks in SAP systems. Report used to generate SM12 is RSENQRR2.

To check the status of a SAP system locking management mechanism you can use transaction code sm12 as shown below. The option Diagnosis in Update simulates a looking operation.

Fig 01 – SM12 – Diagnosis in Extras

Fig 02 – Details of Diagnosis in SM12

I hope this will be helpful to somebody.

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BO XI 3.1 Installation - CMC Login Error

After I installed BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 on this test server, and tried to logon to the CMC, I got this error message “• Error: Server TESTSERVER001.domain.com:6400 not found or server may be down (FWM 01003) null”

Fig 01 - CMC Logon Error

So I thought I should solve it and did succeed and I thought I should document my solution as well. Hopefully it will help somebody.

My configuration was little complicated than that of a normal scenario. I was on Windows Server 2003 SP2, MS SQL Server 2000 SP2 and Oracle9i Client Release Notes Release 2 (9.2) for Windows.

I tried to login with my own username and password, being having admin privileges. It did not help. I checked CCM; I had four entries in there. Three were up and running.

Fig 02 – Central Configuration Manager

I could not go in the Manage Servers area in CCM with either my username/password nor with Administrator as username and no password (the same one I used at the time of installation). I received this error “Unable to log on: Could not connect to server testserver001.domain.com:6400. Please check that the server name is correct and that the server is running”

Fig 03 - Manage Servers error message

I also checked that cms.exe and sia.exe were running as processes in Task Manager.

I did some research on Sheikh Google and found some links that did not gave me a proper solution.

http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj/viewtopic.php?p=512077&sid=129a928e38bbb596168099c7ff09f501
http://forumtopics.org/busobj/viewtopic.php?p=643509&sid=80ef528ddeb02850b9bc740712c1343a
https://forums.sdn.sap.com/message.jspa?messageID=6020340
http://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8661038&tstart=0
http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj/viewtopic.php?t=123499&highlight=fwm+01003

The links provided some situations and some solutions that did not help me. I tried reinstalling BusinessObjects once again and ran into same login error messages. Even InfoView gave me the same message and could not login.

By the way, the CMC and InfoView URLs are changed in BO XI 3.1 and not the same as BO XI R2. CMC in 3.1 uses Java to work. So you have to install Tomcat as part of your installation (or any other web server JBoss 4.04, SAP App Server 7.0, IBM WebSphere CE 2.0 and Sun Java App Server 8.2 you planned) and configure it as per the Install and Deployment guide.

http://ServerName:8080/CmcApp/logon.faces
http://ServerName/InfoViewApp/logon.aspx (.NET)
http://ServerName:8080/InfoViewApp/logon.jsp (Java)

These steps helped me fix my problem:

1) Uninstall the BO completely from Add/Remove programs and then also delete the registry as well (important step).
2) Creat a new CMS database in another server which had MS SQL Server 2005 with a specific username TESTUSER01 (in my case this is used as a service account) and a password.
3) Log on to the server TESTSERVER001 with your own username/password or the one used at other server TESTUSER01 and its related password.
4) Now install BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 from scratch on this TESTSERVER001 server.
5) Point this installation to the the newly created CMS database on other server.
6) Bypass and do not configure the CMS password at the time of installation (I believe this was the key factor) and complete the installation.
7) After the installation, see in CCM if services are up and running. Stop SIA, double click open it (or even right click and click properties), uncheck System Account under Log On As provide the same username and password that was used to create CMS Database in the other server. Make sure the username is in the format DOMAIN\username (I believe this was another key factor)
8) Open the CMC website and log in with administrator as username and no password. Now configure administrator password and also other users who can login.
9) Open the Java InfoView and log in with Administrator as username and no password

I hope this will help somebody. Please comment and reply with suggestions or corrections.

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Beware of Digital Criminals

Today I received this email from Internet security group with this link. So I thought I should put this on my blog as well. Hopefully someone will benefit.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS


• Bob Greene gets an urgent e-mail from an old friend writing, "With tears in my eyes ... "

• The desperate plea for money turns out to be an e-mail scam

• Greene says malware placed on computers when a user clicks on a link can capture keystrokes

• Thieves take over e-mail accounts and seek money from contacts in the address book



For the full story, click the link below:

The 'With tears in my eyes' e-mail