Configuring Agents with OBIA and EBS Cookie Integration

Where I am currently working, we are using EBS and OBIEE in a setup with EBS Cookie Authentication (blog post on this soon). This has some draw backs. One draw back is Agents can not be used. When trying to run an agent under this setup, as a user authenticated via EBS Cookie, you will get the following error:

[OBI-SEC-00015] Unable to find user in identity store

I opened an SR at the time, and the response back was a reference to an existing Bug (Bug 10632223: AGENTS NOT WORKING IN EBS SSO ENVIRONMENT WITH OBIEE 11G) and an enhancement (Bug 8326835: INTRODUCE SUPPORT FOR DELIVERS WITH EBS ICX_COOKIE).

According to the Oracle Support person, neither has been implemented. Apparently, Agents were never intended to be used with EBS cookie users, but only with users contained directly in usable authentication systems (ie OID/OAM/LDAP, etc).

Obviously, this is not acceptable, so I went to work to find a solution to get Agents up and running. We are pretty lucky here, in that every user whom can access OBIEE can access all subject areas in OBIEE. This might be different for you, so the end result might require you to do additional work.

Continue on to read for an explanation of what I did to get Agents up and running.

Configure Weblogic SSL to deny SSLv2

Quick post, with a quick solution.

We are going through some security audits, and one of the things that we had failed on was an SSL test on our OBIEE server. The issue was that by default, Weblogic was allowing SSLv2 and weak ciphers, something out security team doesn't like.

The solution took me some googleing, but I found the change and it was quite simple. Essentially we had to add a simple command line argument to our bi_server startup script:

-Dweblogic.security.SSL.protocolVersion=SSL3 -Dweblogic.security.disableNullCipher=true

That resolved it, and now we are passing the SSL check.

For reference on how we setup SSL for OBIEE in Weblogic on the appserver, check out the previous blog post.

How to Unit Test OBIA Informatica Changes

I've started getting into doing a bit of development with Informatica on our OBIA install (for reference, we are using OBIA 7.9.6.3 + Extension pack). Part of the "best practices" setup by our Oracle Consultant was to create a separate sandbox folder anytime we were making a change to an Infomratica mapping. The difficulty I had was how to test the workflow after I made my changes, as I can't run my change via DAC, without creating a separate execution plan, and I can't test directly in Infomratica, as it references a parameter file that exists on the server.

The solution was to extract the command that DAC would run (pmcmd), create a temporary parameter file, and then run my new mapping from my sandbox folder. And as always, I've created a helpful script to automate this!

Continue on to read for an explanation of what my script does, and a copy of said script.

Setting up SSL for Weblogic

We recently needed to setup SSL for OBIEE so that we could accept the EBS cookie for single sign on between EBS and OBIEE (post to come soon on how to get that all wired up). Unfortunatly I don't have all of the steps, as someone else on the team handles the making of the actual cert, but I can provide all steps around the process.

Continue on to read what I did to create a private key, create a certificate request (CSR), and configure WebLogic to enable the SSL port for OBIEE.

Missing "Treat Text As" options in OBIEE 11g

Something I used to use back in OBIEE 10g was the Override Default Data Format for text to do things with HTML in my Answers Requests. I had assumed this would be available the same way out of the box with 11g, but alas it is not.

What I get:	What I want:

So as always, I did a little digging, and found that in order to have all options show, you need to have the privilege: Save System-Wide Column Formats. What's even better is that out of the box, this privilege is assigned to no one, so you can't even set it!

Continue on to read what I did to allow me to enable the setting for BI Administrators, and finally gain access to all the treat text as options.

Fix "Configuration Error" on 64-bit OBIEE 11.1.1.6.5 Client Tools

Ever since upgrading to 11.1.1.6.5, I was unable to use the 64bit version of the newly installed client tools. The program would always error out on launch. Oddly enough, if I installed the 32bit version, things would work *mostly* fine, well at least no errors on start-up. But then I had to update the 32bit ODBC entries, and it overall was just a hassle to manage.

So I did a little digging, and found that because it installs into Program Files, it creates it's own bi_init.bat file, which sets up it's own ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_INSTANCE, etc.

And guess what, this doesn't work!

Continue on to read what I did to change both the bi_init.bat and adjust some of my environment variables.

Quickly open OBIEE Admin Client in Online Mode

Something I have found myself doing quite often is checking who is connected in OBIEE prior to doing a deployment. The quickest/easiest means I have found is to fire up the Admin Client, and look at the sessions. This allows me to know if I need to notify anyone (and who), prior to taking down the server.

What was always a pain was to go through the multiple steps to open the client, choose Open in Online mode, and select my connection, across multiple environments. Luckily this can be scripted!

Continue on to read the steps to quickly script opening the Admin Client directly in Online mode.