Friday, April 25, 2014

Bug in WebMethods OneData MDM 9.5 standard configuration

When you install WebMethods OneData MDM 9.5 using the Software AG installer, 2 database connections will be created by default as shown in the image below:
1) STG: connection to the Work Area
2) PRD: connection to the Release Area



The parameters for both connections are by default configured using JNDI. The corresponding full config details can be found in the Tomcat config file <install dir>\profiles\ODE\configuration\tomcat\conf\context.xml. These contain JDBC URL, username, password,... Although the username is specified in the JNDI context in the context.xml file, it is also by default specified in the connection details in OneData as shown in the image below.



The value of the User-ID parameter seems be generated automatically and composed out of the connection prefix you define during the installation in SAG Installer, concatenated with the suffix "_wa" for the work area connection and "_ra" for the release area connection.

Although it seems that this configuration is working fine, this is actually not 100% the case. It turns out that when the value in the User-ID parameter doesn't correspond with the actual Oracle username (which is very likely), some functionality like the "Schema Update" to create new Objects from existing tables in the Release Area will not work (existing tables are not shown in OneData UI). So in order to avoid potential unexpected behavior in OneData you should update the User-ID parameter after installation to the actual Oracle username (so identical to the username in context.xml).

Another solution is to not use the JNDI config and copy all the configuration details from the context.xml file to the corresponding fields in the Connection Parameters form in OneData.

This problem also seems to occur in OneData 9.0. I haven't been able yet to verify it in version 9.6. but I couldn't find any record of this error on Software AG Empower, so the bug probably still exists in version 9.6 also.

Author: Kristof Lievens

Monday, April 7, 2014

Fixing HTTP redirect for ARIS 9.5 Design Server after an IP address change

I recently moved a Windows Server 2012 virtual machine running ARIS 9.5 Design Server, from my laptop running VMWare Workstation to a VMWare ESX 5.5 host. My Windows Server 2012 VM has one single network adapter and changing the VM host implied that the IP address of the VM had to be changed because the VM hosts were running in different netwerk segements (my Windows Server 2012 network connection had DHCP enabled, so the IP address changed automatically actually).

After moving my VM, I was able to start ARIS Design Server without a problem, but to my surprise, my browser was redirected to my old IP address every time I tried to connect to the ARIS Design server at default port 5480, even when I used the new IP address of my server or "localhost" as hostname. Turns out that the old IP address was still used by the load balancer component in ARIS Design Server. To fix this problem, you have to update the "httpd.conf" configuration file in the folder <ARIS install root>\server\bin\work\work_loadbalancer_m\httpd\conf. Look for the "ServerName",  "RewriteCond" and "RewriteRule" parameters and update them with the new IP address. After restarting the ARIS Design Server, the redirect in my browser worked correctly.

Author: Kristof Lievens