Introduction Whilst the BI Cluster Controller takes care nicely of clustering and failover for BI Server (nqsserver), we have to do more to ensure further resilience of the stack. A diagram I come back to again and again when working out configuration or connectivity problems is the one on P16 of the Deployment Guide. With this you can work out most issues for yourself through simple reasoning. Print it out, pin it to your wall, and read it!

Production cluster is 2x BI Server and 2x Presentation Services, with a BIG-IP F5 load balancer on the front. Symptoms Users started reporting slow login times to BI. Our monitoring tool (Openview) reported that “BIServer01 may be down. Failed to contact it using ping.”. BIServer01 cannot be reached by ping or ssh from Windows network. Diagnostics nqsserver and nqsclustercontroller on BIServer01 was logging these repeated errors: [nQSError: 12002] Socket communication error at call=send: (Number=9) Bad file number

Introduction In this article I plan to get samplesales and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”). Both samplesales and paint are shipped with 10.1.3.4 of OBIEE, you’ll find them in $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Sample. This article assumes you’ve got the RPD of each into $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Repository and unpacked the web cats for each into $OracleBIdata/web/catalog.

A question that pops up on the OBIEE OTN forum quite often is how to use non-Oracle databases like MS SQL Server when the OBIEE server is running on a non-Windows OS such as Linux. The answer in a nutshell is that since version 10.1.3.3.1 OBIEE has been bundled with ODBC drivers for unix/linux from a company called DataDirect. See the release notes here for more information and installation instructions (as well as a list of support databases).

Here’s a set of scripts that I use on our servers as a quick way to check if the various BI components are up and running. Because we split the stack across servers, there are different scripts called in combination. On our dev boxes we have everything and so the script calls all three sub-scripts, whereas on Production each server will run one of: BI Server Presentation Server & OAS Informatica & DAC The scripts source another script called process_check.

As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.

[edit] See this post too [/edit] On an OBIEE server run [sourcecode language=“bash”] nohup obiee/systemsmanagement/runagent.sh & [/sourcecode] and then run jconsole (make sure you’ve set the DISPLAY first if you’re running it from UNIX). NB: if you don’t have jconsole in your path you can search for it: [sourcecode language=“bash”] $whereis jconsole jconsole: /opt/java1.5/bin/jconsole /opt/java6/bin/jconsole</span> [/sourcecode] You should find it under your java/bin directory You should get this kind of connection dialog: Click connect, and the console will launch.

(See here and here for history) I edited the shell script which is eventually called by run-saw.sh to start the sawserver, (OracleBI)/setup/sawserver.sh, to use trus: Comment out the final line: $SASAWSERVER and insert as a new line: tusc -fepan -o /tmp/sawserver_tusc.out $SASAWSERVER The output of trus ended with this: open("/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) ……… ERR#2 ENOENT open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/server/Bin64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) . ERR#2 ENOENT open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/web/bin64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) …. ERR#2 ENOENT open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/odbc/lib64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) … ERR#2 ENOENT

In investigating the problems with sawserver I was pointed towards a tool called tusc (which appears to be an HP version of truss). You can use it to invoke a program, and get out a bunch of debug information including system calls. You run it like this: $tusc -fep /app/oracle/product/obiee/web/bin64/sawserver64 As a beginner when it comes to hardcore *nix I can only look at this and take pot shots at what’s going on, but with Google by my side I’m interested in the last lines of the output:

We’re getting this error in the Presentation Services plug-in [analytics]. Log file: /j2ee/home/application-deployments/analytics/home_default_group_1/application.log 09/03/30 13:16:38.75 analytics: Servlet error java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused (errno:239) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182) at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:517) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:467) at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:364) at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:178) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.java:63) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.java:70) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPool.createNewConnection(ConnectionPool.java:314) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPool.getConnection(ConnectionPool.java:133) at com.siebel.analytics.web.SAWBridge.processRequest(SAWBridge.java:299) at com.siebel.analytics.web.SAWBridge.doGet(SAWBridge.java:325) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:743) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:856) at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.