Running the OBIEE 12c startup on Windows:

C:\app\oracle\fmw\user_projects\domains\bi\bitools\bin\start.cmd

Just hangs at:

Starting AdminServer ...

No CPU being consumed, very odd. But then … looking at DOMAIN_HOME\servers\AdminServer\logs\AdminServer.out shows the last log entry was:

Enter username to boot WebLogic server:

And that’s bad news, cos that’s an interactive prompt, but not echo’d to the console output of the startup command, and there’s no way to interact with it.

The start.cmd was being called by adding it to the Startup folder (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp), and I guess it was something about this that stopped the prompt coming back to the console, because when I ran it manually from the command prompt, I got this:

C:\Users\Administrator>C:\app\oracle\fmw\user_projects\domains\bi\bitools\bin\start.cmd
BI_PRODUCT_HOME set as C:\app\oracle\fmw\bi\
[...]
Requesting credentials ...
Enter Weblogic login details at prompt
Weblogic Username:

If I entered the credentials, the AdminServer still failed to start, appearing to already be running.

So why was it even prompting for the credentials in the first place? This was a server that had booted just fine previously.

The start.cmd is a wrapper for a Jython WLST script which uses Node Manager to start up all the necessary components. Taking the startWebLogic.cmd and running it independently works fine, and the AdminServer comes up with no boot credentials required. But, from start.cmd the whole process stalls at the interactive prompt for credentials. Weird.

Digging around a bit shows that start.cmd passes an argument to the AdminServer that we can guess is relevant to the problem:

-Dweblogic.system.BootIdentityFile=
C:\app\oracle\fmw\user_projects\domains\bi\servers\AdminServer\data\nodemanager\boot.properties

Loading this file showed an AES-encrypted username/password as you’d expected:

#Fri May 20 15:53:35 UTC 2016
password={AES}7zL9O1AP+5yVmpG1t71wu22m1VCBPyixC9tg8H78m+A\=
username={AES}IIqpK/FkTSV0CKPdigpMuaI0ECplaqv5Oplv9AoDRWM\=

Note the {AES} prefix. If you remove that you can replace it with plain text values. On a guess that maybe the credentials are invalid or corrupted, I reset them:

#Fri May 20 15:53:35 UTC 2016
password=Password01
username=weblogic

After doing this, the stack came up just fine.

Note this is just hacking around on a test server – I wouldn’t recommend changing files that aren’t meant to be changed unless you’re sure it’s the answer, otherwise you can just end up compounding problems…