Wednesday, February 18, 2009

OBIEE: Don't Change the Administrator Password!

I learned the hard way (naturally) that you shouldn't go and change the password for the Administrator account haphazardly.

Yes, I use the Administrator password and not a named account. Yes, I'm trying to change that.

I've been handing out credentials to folks lately and decided to change the password after everyone had their new accounts. Got a call yesterday, "Hey, I'm not getting my reports via email any longer."

Well, we had the big deployment last week and I figured it was somehow related. Login into the OBIEE web site (wtf is that called? Dashboard? Answers?), go to Delivers and see some alerts. Click through and read the error message: invalid username/password. What?

Of course I had forgotten I had changed the Administrator password so I ran around trying to figure out why that could be. Thankfully I didn't run around too long.

Could the password be stored in some config file (which I don't have access to)? I asked the DBA and he wasn't sure.

I tried to use the "Run As" functionality on the iBot using the recipients username. Wait one day...Nope. That didn't work. (Can you tell I like the hit or miss strategy?)

DBA sends me this link.

1. Shutdown OAS and OBIEE services.
2. Change the password in the BI server repository offline.
3.Run crypto tools for both Publisher and BI Scheduler.

cryptotools credstore -add -infile D:\OracleBIData\web\config\credentialstore.xml
BIPublisher Alias : bipublisheradmin
BIScheduler Alias : admin

4. Change password in Scheduler Config in job manager
5. Start OAS server and OBIEE services and update the JDBC connections for BI Server Answers
6. Update security configuration for the BI server security model with the new password.
7. Restart all the servers again. If second restart is not done then BIPublisher reports based on answers will not work.
Stop it!

You really have to do all that to change the password? Kidding right?

I reverted the password back to the original needless to say. I thought it would be quick and easy, but apparently not.

2 comments:

Remc0 said...

I always make a new user which is called scheduler... and may only be used for scheduling.

Now you can change the administrator password as many times as you want and you never have any problems anymore...

You have the same problem when you are setting up an integration between BI Publisher and OBIEE... for this you can make a publisher user as well...

Or use only the user system for both or something...

best regards,

Remc0

oraclenerd said...

@Remc0

That's a very good idea...and one I should have thought of!

Thank you.

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