Thursday, January 15, 2015

The perils of changing admin password in EPM system

Somethings are best left untouched. EPM's Admin password definitely is one of them.

Few days back I changed the administrator password by clicking on the change password option in the menu bar. Initially, everything went fine till the time I tried to refresh the database, and when I did ... its a long story. I scoured the net and got information in bits and pieces. So here I am, collating everything you need to do once you begin the awful journey of recovering admin's password.

A big shout out to my friends Rahul Sharma and Vinit Chawla for helping me getting out of this muck.

Symptoms : When you change the admin password, 
1. Essbase connections are going to fail.
2. If there are more than one directories (active directories: native + MSAD etc) having the same name 'admin', you are in deep trouble.
3. Shared services will not work, probably get 'Service Temporarily Unavailable error'
4. Reporting and RA framework services will start normally, but logs will show a java error. : brio services not started, some gsm exception etc.
5. Essbase server will not start.

Password recovery:
These steps are to be followed when
- you have forgotten the password
- after changing the password, you are not able to login with new as well as old password. (see symptom #2 )

1. Shut down all services.
2. Follow the steps mentioned in the link here.
http://epmcult.blogspot.in/2014/06/resetting-hyperion-workspace-admin.html
Change the field in a table in Foundation Services' schema : CSS_USERS.
If you want to change the password to 'password' use the following command
 
update CSS_USERS
set PASSWORD= '{SSH2}mpQoG4jU00otFocLZM6CWWUzpk9ZmSY5In3l3ZzFCH5byRhkG6ow7z4KxXmXWXSo' where name='admin'; 
alternatively, if you want to change the password to some other character set, you will need to create a new user in native directory with the desired password in a completely different EPM instance. Open the CSS_USERS in that instance, copy the encrypted password and paste it in the query above. Execute and commit.

3. Delete the Essbase.sec file from Essbase bin location.

4. Run the configtool utility, for the first time, you will not be able to check the 'Configure Database' option under Foundation services node. Configuring Foundation service database along with other application's database is very important for this exercise to be successful. Here's how you do it.

find the 'reg.properties' file in 'config' folder. It is located in
/Oracle/Middleware/user_projects/config

In the reg.properties file, there is a line where a password is encrypted. Scramble it with some garbage and save the file again. Now run the configtool utility, you will be able to check 'Configure Database' option under Foundation Services.
Check 'Configure database' of all applications that were installed on the server. You can reuse the tables if you want, drop and recreate is the safest option although you might lose valuable data, its a choice you have to make : the Server or the applications.
Execute the config tool utility successfully.

5. Start all services.Open workspace, Try logging with the new password, it should work. Try opening Shared Services console, if that opens, you have won.
Check if all other services have started successfully by having a look at the logs.

6. Open EAS, you will have to add the Essbase server to the user manually. Expand the admin server node after connecting to the server, in the 'Users' node, right click on the admin user and click on 'edit properties', in the 'Essbase Server' tab, add the server (server name/ip address of the server)

7. Existing Planning applications might still not connect to essbase, open the Data Source Management in Planning Administration, change the essbase connection's login credentials with new password.
Restart Planning (or all ) services again. It is better to remove contents of all 'tmp' and  'cache' folders in domains/servers before you start.

Thats all folks !!

Best of luck !

Thanks to
http://epmcult.blogspot.in/2014/06/resetting-hyperion-workspace-admin.html
http://hyperionplanningandmore.blogspot.com !