Planit CPM Technical Consulting

BLOG CLOSED: New Blog Location

2011-06-19T10:43:00.000+01:00

This blog location is now closed. We have moved all blogs on to our main website at www.planitcpm.com.

TechBlog can now be found at http://www.planitcpm.com/techblog/

thanks

TM1 9.5.1 and IBM Cognos BI 10.1 integration

2011-02-24T16:20:00.001Z

This week I had to advise a customer who has just purchased IBM Cognos 10.1 Business Intelligence on the best way to integrate their existing TM1 9.4 environment with the latest release of BI.

My initial thought was that they were going to require an upgrade of their TM1 servers to 9.5.1, but to be sure I thought I would have a look around the internet and try to find some information to back me up. When I found very little I decided to have a chat with an IBM Cognos support rep, the person who provided the answer was very thorough and more than helpful:

"Q:
Is this integration possible between TM1 9.5.1 and IBM Cognos BI 10.1?

A:
Yes.

Q:
Can earlier versions of TM1 such as 9.4 be integrated with or reported from
IBM Cognos BI 10.1?

A:
From a technical point of view, it is possible for TM1 Version 9.4.1 and
9.5 being integrated or reported from IBM Cognos BI 10.1, see the IBM
website listing the Software Environments supported by Cognos BI 10.1 ->

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27019126

Cognos Business Intelligence 10.1 Software Environments

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27019126#olap

which lists TM1 Version 9.4.1 and 9.5 as having status "Compatible" when
used as an OLAP Datasource to BI.

But we do NOT recommend such a configuration / environment as TM1
Development has not tested and will not test TM1 Version 9.4.1 or 9.5
against Cognos BI 10.1. Thus Cognos BI 10.1 is neither a Software
Environment supported by TM1 Version 9.4.1 nor by TM1 Version 9.5.
Thus you must upgrade to TM1 Version 9.5.1 if you intend to use Cognos BI 10.1.
That is the reason why the TM1 Version 9.5.1 is the only version of TM1 for
which interoperability with Cognos BI 10.1 hs been officially announced.
That is also the very reason why only for TM1 Version 9.5.1 the TM1
Portlets for Cognos BI 10.1 have been released.

If you check the IBM website on the Software Enviroments supported by TM1
Version 9.4.1 ->

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27014836
Cognos TM1 9.4 MR1 Software Environments

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27014836#tm1_fragments
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27014836#tm1_olap_bi

you will notice that Cognos BI 10.1 is NOT listed as a Supported
Environment, neither for the TM1 Fragments aka TM1 Portlets nor for using
TM1 as an OLAP datasource to BI.

If you check the IBM website on the Software Enviroments supported by TM1
Version 9.5 ->

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27017362
Cognos TM1 9.5 Software Environments

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27017362#tm1_fragments

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27017362#tm1_olap_bi

you will notice that Cognos BI 10.1 is NOT listed as a Supported
Environment, neither for the TM1 Fragments aka TM1 Portlets nor for using
TM1 as an OLAP datasource to BI.

If you check the IBM website on the Software Enviroments supported by TM1
Version 9.5.1 ->

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27018895
Cognos TM1 9.5.1 Software Environments

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27018895#portlets

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27018895#olap

you will notice that Cognos BI 10.1 is listed as a Supported Environment.

A personal recommendation:

To my knowledge, within the next 4 to 8 weeks TM1 Version 9.5.2 will be
released. Shortly after the release of TM1 9.5.2 the Fixpack 1 (FP1) for
Cognos BI 10.1 will be released. The BI integration between TM1 Version
9.5.2 and Cognos 10.1 FP1 has been greatly improved compared to the
previous BI integration between TM1 Version 9.5.1 and Cognos BI 10.1 in
terms of performance, stability and user experience.

Thus I recommend to start now with TM1 Version 9.5.1 and Cognos BI 10.1,
but prepare to perform an upgrade to TM1 Version 9.5.2 and Cognos 10.1 FP1
in the near future."

So, I believe that this information is very much worth sharing with anyone out there looking for information on how to integrate TM1 with IBM Cognos 10 Business Intelligence 10.1 - sometimes its just nice to have the answers in one place in nice plain english!

IBM Cognos 10 - IBM Cognos Mobile

2011-01-19T11:02:00.001Z

With iOS devices now supported within IBM Cognos 10, I supposed it was now time to have a go at installing IBM Cognos 10 - IBM Cognos Mobile. We use iPhones as standard and have a few iPads to hand also, we never did have any Blackberrys to test with.

The install process was very simple, as with the other products there are Gateway Components and Application Client components: -

Once the software is installed there are a couple of extra bits inside IBM Cognos Configuration, namely an environments section setting for your Blackberry Enterprise Server, a Service setting and a Data Access section called "Mobile" which needs a database such as the Content Store and Notification Store etc.

Once these are configured and the application is restarted, connecting to http://servername/ibmcognos will present you with a screen to select the full or mobile clients. This only happens when accessing from a mobile browser, so desktop users won't get affected.

Once you are in and have selected to use the IBM Cognos Mobile version you will be presented with your IBM Cognos Connection window.

Navigating down the folders will take you to your reports which can be run using a touch-friendly layout.

Even the prompt selections lists are shown using familiar formats.

The Sample reports are displayed with ease using the iPad's screen. With a bit of work they can likely be improved upon and fine-tuned for mobile devices, but the standard view works well and delivers a nice interface for quick easy access without a laptop.

Configuring Failover for IBM Cognos 8.5.1 Controller

2011-01-19T09:30:00.000Z

Over the last couple of months an unusually high number of customers (i.e. more than zero) have all been asking the same question... "can you tell us how to create a DR failover solution for IBM Cognos Controller?" - this is a question that got me scratching my head somewhat.

We already know that you can "split the COM+" components in Controller to separate out such functions as Consolidation, this isn't so much fail-over as a crude form of load-balancing or load-sharing. But can you actually create a fail-over for IBM Cognos Controller?

One of the methods we considered initially, involved the use of Microsoft Clustering, this sounds viable in theory, however a phone call to IBM support suggested that this would not be supported.

After this blow a couple of more "realistic" options came to mind: -

Cold-Standby
DNS Alias

With one particular client we decided that they would utilise their test environment to trial one of the above. It was decided that the cold-standby method was not desirable as they did not want to have to power one server up manually and risk the possibility of both servers becoming available at once in the event that the other box was not shut down.

What we did was to install two separate servers, each with their own IBM Cognos BI and Controller components.
The BI server has to point at its own "real" server name or DNS name, if you use the same DNS alias for both servers within BI it causes problems within the Content Manager when the second server tries to register its dispatchers.

The IBM Cognos Controller Configuration application however needs to be pointed to the DNS Alias, this way when the Controller client etc all look for the server, they are looking for the same thing each time.

On the face of things, this seemed to work, basic testing showed that we could switch servers quite easily by altering the DNS alias record, however I still had an uneasy feeling about this as the COM+ components for Controller would still be running on each server at the same time.

A week or so later, there had been a number of complaints about strange behaviour with Controller, the software was randomly unavailable or not responding. Each time a reboot of the active server seemed to solve the problems.
We suggested that it may be worthwhile turning off the "standby" server for a week or so to see if things improved.

After just over one week, there had been no problems, this pointed at a problem with having two identically configured Controller servers turned on at once.

So it seems, for the time being at least, you cannot automatically, or even semi-automatically fail-over IBM Cognos Controller. We reverted to a cold-standby scenario which seems to be working well for now.

If you have any different experiences, or if you have managed to make this work somewhere, please feel free to get in touch, I am sure there are many customers out there looking for a similar solution.

IBM Cognos 10.1 eAssembly Numbers

2010-11-01T17:55:00.001Z

If you have ever downloaded the IBM Cognos products and cursed yourself for not renaming the eAssembly files with their corresponding names then you may find this list useful.

IBM Cognos 10.1 Business Intelligence

Parts and Platforms	Details	eImage
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Quick Start Guide 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZQ54ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZS50ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZS55ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Required	CZS4QML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Required	CZS4SML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium Multilingual	Required	CZS4PML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium Multilingual	Required	CZS4RML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Required	CZS4LML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Required	CZS4MML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Required	CZS4ZML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Required	CZS54ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Required	CZS4XML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Required	CZS53ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux pSeries Multilingual	Required	CZS4VML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux pSeries Multilingual	Required	CZS52ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux on System z Multilingual	Required	CZS57ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux on System z Multilingual	Required	CZS58ML
IBM Cognos Framework Manager 10.1.0 Windows English	Required	CZQ6MEN
IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6KML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Samples 10.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual	Optional	CZQ4UML
IBM Cognos Supplementary Languages Documentation 10.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6UML
IBM Cognos Lifecycle Manager 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ6NEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZS51ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Optional	CZS4NML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium Multilingual	Optional	CZS4TML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Optional	CZS3SML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Optional	CZS4YML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Optional	CZS4WML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server 10.1.0 Linux pSeries Multilingual	Optional	CZS4UML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Modeling 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ4TEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6GML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6BML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6AML
BM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6EML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6FML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6DML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Linux pSeries Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6CML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 for Linux on System z Multilingual	Optional	CZQ96ML
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ6TEN
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC English	Optional	CZQ6QEN
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 AIX English	Optional	CZQ6PEN
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris English	Optional	CZQ6SEN
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 Linux x86 English	Optional	CZQ6REN
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 Linux on System z English	Optional	CZQ9AEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics 32-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZQ69ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics 64-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZQ68ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Optional	CZQ66ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics 64-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Optional	CZQ64ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium Multilingual	Optional	CZQ65ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics 64-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Optional	CZQ67ML
IBM Cognos Dynamic Query Analyzer 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ63EN
IBM Cognos Dynamic Query Analyzer 10.1.0 Linux x86 English	Optional	CZQ62EN

IBM Cognos 10.1 Data Manager

Parts and Platforms	Details	eImage
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager Quick Start Guide 10.1.0 English	Optional	CZQ9UEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 Windows English	Required	CZQ9KEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 Windows English	Required	CZQ9S EN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 AIX English	Required	CZQ9EEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 AIX English	Required	CZQ9LEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium English	Required	CZQ9FEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX Itanium English	Required	CZQ9MEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC English	Required	CZQ9GEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC English	Required	CZQ9NEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux pSeries English	Required	CZQ9HEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux pSeries English	Required	CZQ9PEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 English	Required	CZQ9IEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 English	Required	CZQ9QEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 32-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris English	Required	CZQ9JEN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager 64-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris English	Required	CZQ9REN
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager Connector for SAP R/3 32-bit and 64-bit 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ9TEN

IBM Cognos 10.1 PowerPlay

Parts and Platforms	Details	eImage
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Quick Start Guide 10.1.0 Multilingual	Optional	CZQ9WML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Client 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZQ9VML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZS5QML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZS5VML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 32-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Required	CZS5MML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Required	CZS5SML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 32-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Required	CZS5LML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 64-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Required	CZS5RML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Required	CZS5PML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Required	CZS5UML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Required	CZS5NML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Required	CZS5TML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZQ6GML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Required	CZQ6BML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Required	CZQ6EML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Required	CZQ6FML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Required	CZQ6DML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZS50ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZS55ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Optional	CZS4QML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 HP-UX PA-RISC Multilingual	Optional	CZS4SML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Optional	CZS4LML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 AIX Multilingual	Optional	CZS4MML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Optional	CZS4ZML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Oracle Solaris Multilingual	Optional	CZS54ML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 32-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Optional	CZS4XML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server 64-bit 10.1.0 Linux x86 Multilingual	Optional	CZS53ML
IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6KML
IBM Cognos Supplementary Languages Documentation 10.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual	Optional	CZQ6UML
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Samples 10.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual	Optional	CZQ4UML
IBM Cognos Framework Manager 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ6MEN

IBM Cognos Mobile

Parts and Platforms	Details	eImage
IBM Cognos Mobile Quick Start Guide 10.1.0 Multilingual	Optional	CZQ9BML
IBM Cognos Mobile 32-bit 10.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual	Required	CZQ9CML
IBM Cognos Mobile 64-bit 10.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual	Required	CZQ9DML

IBM Cognos 10.1 Planning

Parts and Platforms	Details	eImage
IBM Cognos Planning 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual eAssembly	N/A	CRCW3ML
IBM Cognos Planning Quick Start Guide 10.1.0 Multilingual	Optional	CZQ5YML
IBM Cognos Planning Client 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZQ5ZML
IBM Cognos Planning Server 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZS5AML
IBM Cognos Planning Administration 10.1.0 Windows Multilingual	Required	CZQ61ML
IBM Cognos Framework Manager 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ6MEN
IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager 10.1.0 Windows English	Optional	CZQ6TEN

Cognos Access Manager Backups (Exporting to LAE File)

2010-10-29T09:48:00.000+01:00

This article is writtien in response to the common questions asked in relation to Access Manager Backups.
The user information held within your directory server is not only useful but its also time consuming to reproduce, so having a good backup is very important.
Exporting to an LAE file also gives you an ideal way to migrate user information between environments if you have multiple Access Manager Server implementations, as well as being of use when running local copies of the Cognos products.

Cognos Access Manager

Access Manager is the program responsible for controlling the authentication for the Cognos Planning software. Running at the back-end is the Sun Java Directory Server which is an LDAP directory server.
Once your system is up and running you will likely have a large number of users and groups that have been created inside Access Manager, it is important to ensure that a copy of this data is taken at regular intervals in order to avoid having to re-create it manually.

There is a process for exporting this information which creates a file known as a .LAE file (Local Authentication Export), this file can be temporarily used as an authentication source for Access Manager in the event of a broken directory server, but can also provide an import source for restoring your user and group information when moving / re-installing a directory server.

To create a .LAE file, load up Access Manager Administration, you will see “Directory Servers” and “Local Authentication Export Files” in the tree.

Right-hand click on the “Local Authentication Export Files” branch as shown in the image below.

Select “Add .LAE File…”

A form will appear in which you will need to provide information for your .LAE file, a logical name such as “BackupNamespace” will do.
You must also provide a physical file name and directory in which to store the file.

Next, click on the “Ticket Service” tab and fill in some details there. You will need the name of your Directory Server, and the port that the Ticket Service is running on. This is typically 9010.
Click “Test” and you will get a message confirming that the operation was successful.

Once you have tested you can then click “Ok” to generate the LAE. A message will appear asking if you want to make the LAE to be compatible with older namespaces. Click “No” as this is typically not required.

The next step is to complete the export of your Namespace. Right hand click on your namespace, this is frequently called “Default” and appears in the tree under your Directory Server.

Choose “Export to .LAE file…”

You will be given a window with your LAE file listed. Select your LAE and ensure that “Empty the Target namespace” is selected otherwise it will append. Now choose the “Export” button to create your backup.

You will be given a summary of the operation to indicate the process has completed.

That’s it, you have backed up your namespace to a .LAE file. This is a manual process that must be run periodically, this may be completed from the I.T. support persons computer or on the Cognos Planning administrators computer, who ever takes on the role, it is important that the process is completed as often as you feel the need to save your changes. The implication of not having a .LAE file backup is the likelihood of having to re-create all of your users and userclasses in the event of a directory server loss.

Finally, it is possible to build an automated process for this task, however this is outside of the scope of this document. If you feel that an automated process is something that is important to your organization then this can be achieved using Technical Consultants with Cognos Planning expertise.

IBM Cognos 10 - First Impressions

2010-10-28T10:56:00.002+01:00

Ok, so I downloaded my first components of the IBM Cognos 10 suite yesterday morning, I was on-site with a customer so completed a hurried installation of the BI and Planning components during my lunch hour. I am pretty certain this is not the place to look for an in depth insight into the product and its latest changes.

Right, very first impressions then… the installation process was quite smooth, not much has changed from Cognos 8 in this respect, the same installer, the same configuration manager, albeit with a few new options etc, but anyone familiar with the Cognos 8 installation routine should not struggle with getting IBM Cognos 10 installed and running.

Now, the product is all installed, time to hit the website. There is a change here. No more http://gatewayserver/cognos8 (or would that be cognos10?) in this release, IBM have enforced their branding and opted for the snappy http://gatewayserver/ibmcognos - a pedantic complaint perhaps, especially as its easily customized to whatever you want it to be, but being the kind of bloke who likes to stick with the recommended configuration I am finding typing the url IBMCOGNOS to be a bit of a pain in the … you know where.

Ok, back to the product, the whole look and feel has been changed, as expected its pretty much what was hinted at if you ever looked at IBM Cognos Express… the blue is liberally splashed throughout the new GUI, it looks pretty sweet. Even the logon prompt (assuming you are not using integrated authentication) now finally looks worthy of the product. Aesthetics… tick!

I spy some new menu options on the default entry portal. Under “My Content” there is now an option called “My Dashboards” – fairly self explanatory I suppose, but one we can cover in more depth another day. The same goes for the new “My Inbox” which from a first glance appears to be a place for notifications to arrive.
Under the “My Actions” section a new option to “Create My Dashboards” appears. Along with “Author Business Reports” and then the usual options for loading Query Studio, Report Studio, Event Studio and the Planning and Forecasting option – Remember, I installed Planning 10.1 as well.

We get a new option under the IBM Cognos Administration screens, this is for Index Search, something to do with the integration of the IBM Cognos Go Search into the main product.

The item that has got my attention is the entry for “Human Task and Annotation Services” – I currently have no idea what that is all about, but it’s now my mission over the next few days to find out all about it.

Now over to IBM Cognos Planning 10.1 – I haven’t had much time to play with this one yet. On the face of it, nothing much has changed, from what I have heard that would be about right, it has been explained to me as a stability and performance release – that will be welcome news to many customer, despite the previous version of the product being pretty robust. One of the key changes detailed though is that this release has “significant improvements in handling sparsity and large models”.
A key change allows the Planning Service to run as a non-administration account, the first time this has happened and this will be very welcome news to many an IT department.

More news later as and when I spend further time working with the product. But first impressions are that it’s a very polished looking release with some very interesting new features. A version upgrade that I will be recommending to customer within a few more weeks of testing.

Enabling ISAPI in IIS on Windows 7

2010-07-27T12:23:00.002+01:00

An associate recently asked me if I could help him figure out why his Cognos application would not work under Windows 7, he told me that he was getting error messages saying that support for ISAPI was not installed.

The good news was that he was right, so I put together a very short guide to help him install support for ISAPI under his Windows 7 installation.

From Control Panel, launch the Programs and Features applet.

Once opened, select “Turn Windows features on or off” from the left hand side.

When the “Windows Features” window opens, expand

“Internet Information Services”

and then expand

“World Wide Web Services”

You will see “Application Development Features”, expand this and ensure that the following items are selected:

“ISAPI Extensions”

“ISAPI Filters”

Click “Ok”

You will now have installed support for ISAPI on Windows 7.

IBM Cognos Express losing Administrator password?

2010-06-30T17:12:00.001+01:00

Cognos Express Namespace locked!

I know that most of the posts on here so-far have been detailing how to resolve certain problems, or how to improve performance etc, but now I have a problem of my own. I haven't been able to fix it, but I also have not been able to find any other cases of the problem on a Google search either.

It may well transpire that the customer had changed something since the original installation, but they deny looking at it so here goes.

A few weeks ago I performed a customer installation of IBM Cognos Express, it took the best part of a day due to some really tedious problem with using the Xcelerator client, but aside from that there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Since the installation, a few weeks have passed with supposedly nobody using the system. Now today, I get a call from a visiting consultant asking what I had set the Administrator password to be. This caught me a bit off guard as I had no reason to change the password at all. Co-incidentally I also found that I didn't know the password to my own local VM copy of Cognos Express so I began to think I was going mental! (I found out later that my own issue with the VM was a different problem).

So the IBM Cognos Express installation at the customer site appears to have locked / changed the password of its own accord. I am not sure yet if its possible to hack the custom security provider and reset this, though its something I will look into for future reference.

So here we are, I definitely did not change the password on installation, I had no reason to, though if I had, it would have been one password only, the one that I always use if I have to come up with a temporary password during a customer engagement and it was not that one.

If you have had this problem happen to you before, please let me know about it. Even if you didn't manage to fix it.

thanks.

Alert: Potentially serious security flaw in IBM Cognos Express

2010-06-30T17:02:00.000+01:00

IBM Cognos Express allows access to Tomcat Manager using hard coded credentials

Flash (Alert)

This is a very lazy blog post. but it is one worth posting, I came accross this entry when looking for an entirely different problem, however as it is relating to a potentially serious security problem I am posting it on our blog.

The original articles can be found on the following links:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21419179

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21419065

ZDI:
http://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-10-018/

Abstract

It is possible to gain access to Tomcat Manager in IBM Cognos Express using hard coded credentials. This could create a security vulnerability that would allow someone to carry out a denial of service attack.

Content

In order to resolve the issue and secure the Cognos Express environment, follow these steps:
1. Stop the 'IBM Cognos Express' service from Service Manager.
Start>Settings>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services

2. Delete the following files under the IBM Cognos Express installation folder. The default location of this folder is
C:\Program Files\IBM\Cognos Express if you did not change the location during the installation process.

\webapps\manager.xml
\tomcat4.1.27\conf\tomcat-users.xml
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\html-manager-howto.html
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\manager-howto.html
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\images\asf-logo.gif
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\images\tomcat.gif
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\images\void.gif
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\WEB-INF\web.xml

3. Delete the following folders under the IBM Cognos Express installation folder:

\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\WEB-INF
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager\images
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps\manager
\tomcat4.1.27\server\webapps

4. Start the 'IBM Cognos Express' service from Service Manager.

Acknowledgements:
This problem (ZDI-CAN-670) was brought to IBM's attention by Abdul Aziz Hariri of Insight Technologies, who worked with TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative.

Headache Installing TM1 9.5 Perspectives Client on your PC

2010-05-20T20:15:00.004+01:00

I have had a right ball-ache today trying to get TM1 Perspectives and Architect onto an XP workstation computer.

What should have been a very straight forward installation was complicated by what turned out to be a "dirty PC".

There is not really any need to cover the actual installation of Perspectives or Architect here as its a very basic Windows Installer, but when it goes wrong it does so seemingly quietly.

The first error message that I encountered was as follows:

The wizard was interrupted before IBM Cognos TM1 could be completely installed.
Your system has not been modified.To complete installation at another time, please run wizard again.

This was quite frustrating, I run the installer several times, I rebooted the computer and installed Windows and Office updates. Nothing seemed to make a difference.
Looking in the Windows Event log didn't offer up any useful clues either. So I decided to embark on a bit of detective work.

In the %temp% folder I found a log file called IBM_TM1Install.log - a rather large file which surely would contain the answer SOMEWHERE!?!

To my relief it did, a useful error:

The TM1 installation was unable to create a backup copy of the previous TM1 Web files on your computer. To continue, do one of the following: Stop any Windows services or programs that may be locking the TM1 Web files. Or, select a different installation directory for the new TM1 Web files.

Well, it would have been a useful error, had I actually had TM1 Web or in fact ANY previous version of ANY TM1 software installed. The trouble is, I had never installed anything to do with TM1 on this particular computer.

This led me to take a punt and assume that it had found some sort of Cognos related files somewhere on the system. First thing to check "Program Files", nothing there.
So next I checked the registry. Bingo! There was a Cognos entry under HKLM\Software and HKCU\Software. Further investigation showed that these were related to a previous installation of the Cognos Planning client. As they were no longer needed I deleted them and tried the installation of TM1 again.

Great news, this time it worked a treat. And then it broke again. At least it had the decency to offer me a new error to play with.

Error 1609: An error occurred while applying security settings. ASPNET is not a valid user group. This could be a problem with the package, or a problem connecting to a domain controller on the network. Check your network connection and click Retry, or Cancel.

Oh lovely, an error that could mean anything. It didn't take much googling to find an answer though. The installer is expecting to find ASP.NET, or rather an ASP.NET account. I was quite pleased at finding this information as it seemed to be an easy fix... if it worked.

Create the following:

User Name: ASPNET
Full Name: ASP.NET Machine Account
Description: Account for running ASP.NET applications
Password: [whatever you decide]

set: User cannot change password and Password never expires.

I hit the retry button, it worked!

Ok, so thats not really a very dramatic ending but thats what pleased me the most. After spending around 3 hours messing around with it, it finally installed.

Installing Excel Link (Excel Addin) for IBM Cognos 8 Controller 8.5

2010-05-19T11:37:00.002+01:00

As I seem to have had nothing much to say for well over a month its about time I found something to write about. In my desperation to fill blog-inches I thought I would resort to a brief run-through of the required steps for installing the IBM Cognos Controller Excel-Addin.

These steps seem to work fairly well and so may be useful to some of you at least. The application installation does require that you have local Administrator rights, this is unfortunate for a web-based application but for the time being is also unavoidable.

Some pre-requisites first

You will need Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 with SP1 (or SP2)
Of course... Local Administrator Rights.

Installing the Excel Link client

The client installation its self is easy, simply navigate to the following URL on your environment:

   http://SERVERNAME/cognos8/controllerbin/ControllerClient.msi

Follow through any steps in the installation wizard as required.

Enabling the Controller .NET Configuration

Now, open the command prompt and navigate to the following directory:

   %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

Then type in the following command all on one line:

   caspol -q -m -ag "All_Code" -url http://SERVERNAME/* FullTrust -name "Controller_SERVERNAME" -d "Controller_SERVERNAME"

Setting the correct version of .NET for Excel

We need to set Excel to use the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, this is achieved by creating a file called EXCEL.EXE.config on the workstation PC.

Navigate using Windows Explorer to the folder where your Office installation is located, typically:

   c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11

With Notepad create a new text file called EXCEL.EXE.config, the contents should be as below:

Before you run Excel to test the add-in

I have found that this does not always work correctly if you skip out this step, so now, navigate to Cognos Connection at http://SERVERNAME/cognos8 - then click "Consolidate my Financial Information".

This will launch a further installer which will take you into the main Controller application.

Once this is done the Excel Link components will work just as expected.

A few thoughts on using IBM Cognos 8 products on Virtual Servers

2010-04-15T17:27:00.000+01:00

With more and more customers using VMware lately it's becoming a somewhat futile effort to keep on battling against the virtualisation march. So maybe it is time to stop fighting it and instead embrace the VMware onslaught. Rather than banging on about why you should not run IBM Cognos Planning software on VMware, lets just discuss its use in a more balanced way.

Virtualisation has got its feet well under the table. IT departments us virtualisation products not only for the consolidation of existing servers, but also for the deployment of new products in the server room. The lure of greater ease of management, lower energy usage, savings in rack space and the opportunity to gain some new skills is proving too strong to resist.

The virtualisation platforms are constantly evolving and improving brining "near-native" performance, which is a good thing. Utilising those wasted CPU cycles can seem like a great idea. And it is. In most cases.
As with any software product there are very good reasons virtualise your IBM Cognos servers, but there are also some instances where it should be avoided.

IBM Cognos Planning on VMware?

The IBM Cognos 8 Planning product set is made up of two core products. IBM Cognos 8 Analyst and IBM Cognos 8 Contributor. Analyst is frequently used stand-alone in smaller deployments, the server-side product requires very little server resource, though with the introduction of IBM Cognos 8 (not including the 8.1 release) customers now need to find a Web Server (usually IIS) and a database server (usually SQL Server) purely for the provision of authentication.

In these cases VMware is a no-brainer. Who wants to spend cold hard cash on a physical bit of kit that's doing little more than logging users on and providing a shared folder?

So Analyst only clients wanting to use VMware? Go ahead. It's perfect for you. If you have Contributor, things suddenly get a little more interesting. Contributor is the biggest problem when considering virtualisation, the reason for this is that the software is already designed to make the most of any CPU power you can throw at it. Ok, so in most cases it's not making use of these CPU's for 24 hours a day, but it can certainly be running jobs for several hours at a time all at 100% CPU usage.

This is not great for the other systems on your VMware host server. It also kind of defeats the purpose of using VMware if you are providing your Virtual Guest with a one-to-one CPU relationship to the host system.

This brings me on to my second point. A lot of mid-to-large sized installations of IBM Cognos Planning are built using multiple servers to provide the best possible performance and scalability. This means separate Web, Admin, Job and Database servers.
Many large clients have multiple Job Servers, each with 8 core CPU's and 16 GB of RAM, and they are still heavily utilised thank you very much. Putting all of these servers inside of VMware has been shown to degrade performance significantly as various servers which seem separate are infact on the same host and so cause job scheduling clashes.

I want to stop sounding like a VM-basher. I guess its a good time to point out that there are severaly customers who are now very happily running IBM Cognos Planning on VMware. Some even have these multi-server installs. There are a few reasons for this.

They have a small user base
They have small, uncomplex planning models
They don't run many Job processes
They are keeping the number of competing virtual guests low

Another reason may be that many of the more recent VMware based installations also have been completed using the most modern hardware available, the newer CPU's are so powerful that processing these planning jobs takes much less time than it used to, so jobs that would previously have taken hours to complete now finish within minutes. Whilst its still quicker to run on native hardware, the difference is starting to get a little harder to notice.

Important considerations when running IBM Cognos 8 Planning on VMware

Some things that we have found when working with customers running VMware platforms, from those who have succeeded and from those who have failed.

Keep the number of Virtual Guests low. When the Contributor jobs are running you don't want the rest of your servers to suffer.
Do not throttle the CPU or Memory usage on the IBM Cognos Planning servers, on software designed to make the most out of the hardware available to it this really is defeating the object. It has caused many deployments on VMware to fail.
Consider targetting your use of virtualisation, be open to the fact that maybe not all servers should be virtualised. IBM Cognos 8 Planning Job Servers are likely to be better off on good, high-powered physical servers. Good targets for virtualisation are:

IBM Cognos 8 Gateway Server
IBM Cognos 8 BI servers (in some cases)
IBM Cognos 8 Planning Administration Server
Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Server (assuming they are dedicated for IBM Cognos use)
Citrix Servers (On a case by case basis)

Spread out the IBM Cognos Planning Job servers. By this we mean, keep them spread over as many physical hosts as possible, the end users may create job server clusters and use these to schedule their jobs, if their job servers are using the same physical hardware, attempts at job scheduling will fail as multiple jobs compete for CPU resources.

Cognos Planning Development on VMware

Where VMware pretty much always comes in to its own is in development environments, the ability to quickly bring up clean server builds that have been stored away on a hard drive somewhere is a huge advantage, you get the server operating system, database server and applications all installed and configured just the way you need them, archive the virtual machine off somewhere and start your development. Any time you need a clean set of servers again, you just dig out the archive and start again.

In these environments where performance is not a prime concern, the use of a virtualisation product is likely to be a winner.

Even IBM are now starting to ease up on their harsh tone on VMware, there is a general acceptance that customers want to run the software in this environment and so they are starting to be a bit more open to providing support for this.

Customising the deployment of IBM Cognos 8.4 Contributor Rich Client to users

2010-04-09T12:35:00.001+01:00

The new IBM Cognos Planning Contributor 8.4 Rich Client is a very nice bit of kit bringing several enhancements over the previous ActiveX based client, most of these are user orientated, nice pretty colours and enhanced functionality, but from a technical administrators perspective the most important change is that the "thin client" no longer requires the end-user to have administrator rights on their local machine to install it.

This is achieved through a number of improvements:

The application now installs to the %userprofile%\Application Data\ folder which all users should have full control over.
Fewer registry entry changes are made, those which are made are done under HKEY_CURRENT_USER - again, all users should have rights to update this.
Finally, as the client is java based it registers no DLL files or COM components

The downside of this however is that there have been a number of occasions where it is not desirable to install to the %userprofile% folders.

One such occasion was witnessed at a client who used roaming profiles for their Windows users, because of the use of roaming profiles their accounts were limited to a maximum profile size of 150MB now, with the "thin client" weighing in at a not-so-thin 138MB this cause problems that prevented the newly inflated profile from being saved and so also prevented the user from logging off their workstations.

Another client more recently reported that they had problems with the client not working properly on occasion, possibly caused by some users "cleaning" their user profile directories manually. The required fix for this was to uninstall and reinstall the client each time they used it.

Changing the installation paths.

What we were asked was this... "How can we manually set the installation path" and "How can we deploy the installer so that its installed automatically for all users to customised path".

The first of these is quite simple. IBM provide a manual installer for the Web Client. This is found, most easily, with the Fix Pack installers where it is offered in a stand alone installer via Fix Pack Central.

FP1: C8_Plan_Client_8_4_Win32_FP001.tar.gz
FP2: C8_Plan_Client_8_4_Win32_FP002.tar.gz

Once extracted, you are given an IBM Cognos installer wizard which can be run where the files are automatically installed to x:\Program Files\Cognos\c8

This will of course require that Administrator rights are given to the users or that the install is run manually for them as it is writing files to a system area.

The other option is to use the already provided .MSI packages that are used when a user visits the Contributor Web page. They can be found on the Gateway Server in the following folder:

x:\Program Files\cognos\c8\webcontent\rcp_installs

CognosRCP.msi must be installed first as this is the Client Framework.
contributor.msi must be installed second, this is the Web Grid etc.

When run manually neither MSI appears to offer any options, they simply run in the background and install to the %userprofile%\Application Data\ folders. However it appears that you can manipulate the install location using the command line, an example of what I managed to get working is below:

msiexec /i CognosRCP.msi TARGETDIR="C:\Program Files\Cognos\c8" ALLUSERS="Yes"

followed by

msiexec /i contributor.msi TARGETDIR="C:\Program Files\Cognos\c8" ALLUSERS="Yes"

In my testing this seems to have worked. Installing to the correct folder under Program Files and also, crucially, working when accessing the Contributor grid.

It is not always the products fault.

2010-04-09T12:17:00.000+01:00

An important lesson was learned earlier this week, really its something I already knew, but it was useful to get a reminder of this. It was also useful to remind the customer of the same.

We got a call requesting help with an issue where Cognos Planning Analyst appeared to be behaving differently between the old server environment (IBM Cognos 8.4 RTM) and the new server environment (IBM Cognos 8.4 FP2) when running a d-link within Analyst.

Now I already know that Analyst is not the most technical of products, so to hear of such strange problems (i.e. the d-link not recognising the source of an ODBC connection) is quite unusual and can be quite frustrating to deal with. As is usual in such cases our client was convinced that the problem was within Analyst and attempts to convince him that the cause was unlikely to be with Analyst were seemingly difficult to push.

After a little playing around looking at the source CSV files and comparing them with those from the old system we decided that on the face of it, the systems were identical.
It appeared that the problem may have been to do with the actions the SQL code in the d-link source was trying to process. It was manipulating the data prior to inserting it into Analyst.

The first thing I tried was to remove the customised SQL code and use a straight forward select statement. This worked straight away. So the file was able to be read. Though what I then found was that the data brought back was not in the expected format.

Another look at the ODBC connection and a click of the "options" button exposed some additional settings where you can set the delimiter type, header cells and other formatting options for the text file. Once these had been set we went back to Analyst and opened the d-link to find that it magically worked now.

So this is an example of a problem that appeared to be the fault of the product which in fact ended up to be caused by incorrect settings on the ODBC connection. One worth remembering I think.

SQL Server 2008 Native Client and IBM Cognos Contributor

2010-04-01T12:18:00.000+01:00

An old problem reared its head again today, taking me back to the days not too long after SQL Server 2005 was released and the advice from Cognos was to use the new fangled SQL Server Native Client (SQLNCLI) for best performance within Contributor for both the connections within the Contributor Administration Console as well as the Contributor Website.

The problem was that you were unable to create Publish Containers using the SQL Server Native Client, it failed miserably. Instead your publish containers had to use the old SQLOLEDB provider.

It took me a little while to work out why SQLNCLI wasn't able to connect at all with my new IBM Cognos 8.4 FP2 on SQL Server 2008, what I finally discovered was that the provider name has changed to SQLNCLI10. Ok, so following the old SQL Server 2005 with Planning logic I opted to change my datastore connections to use SQLNCLI10.

Success! The application created fine, the jobs all tested out fine except.... yep, thats right, the publish container won't create again. Now I don't know why this is, or what changes in each release of the SQL Native Client, but once again we can't create a publish container. So once again we are forced to use SQLOLEDB for the Publish Containers and SQLNCLI10 - unless we should in fact avoid this altogether, for the application connections.

Remembering the importance of server reboot.

2010-03-23T09:02:00.001Z

Too often in a support situation people poke fun and make sarcastic comments about the requests for screenshots and reboots to clear problems, seen as being either delaying tactics or lazy troubleshooting, so sometimes the humble server reboot is overlooked, as we try too hard to find another fix for the problems at hand.

Earlier this week a client got in touch about a problem they encountered following some issues with their Cognos service account on their Windows 2003 servers. Initially all of the Contributor applications were unavailable, each giving a message on the web page stating that:

"The application definition is being updated on the server. Please try again in a little while"

Very polite, but not too helpful. As far as we knew the application definition was in no need of being updated. But try again in a little while we did.

Four out of five applications did indeed become available but the last one refused. So we viewed the error logs only to find there was no specific help there, we tried to GTP, Synchronise, GTP again, each time the GTP successful, unless a reconcile job was required, at which point the reconcile failed to complete even a single e.list item.

"The application must be corrupted" we declared. "I suggest that you restore the database from a backup file". And so within 30 minutes a backup file from Friday night was restored and we tried again.

"The application definition is being updated on the server. Please try again in a little while" the server responded.

By now time was getting on, nobody wanted to stay on the phone so we offered that it may be worthwhile getting the databases off-site to try some testing on our own servers, to limit the drain on the customers time of course. And so we suggested the following:

Try a reboot of all the servers if possible
If the reboot is unsuccessful, please upload the backup files so we can try them ourselves

An hour later we received an email saying the servers had been rebooted and the application was now working. The customer quite rightly said it was a bit of a shame in a way, that we had not tried this earlier in the day. Though I have to wonder if we had suggested rebooting the servers as a first stab at finding a fix for the solution if it would have been greeted so warmly.

So maybe we should remember that rebooting the server is not always the lazy option, but simply a way of ensuring that all the cobwebs have been blown out before resorting to more thorough investigations.

IBM Cognos 8 on Windows 2008 - Ouch.

2010-03-19T18:22:00.004Z

After just two years it seems the IT world is beginning to wake up to Windows 2008 Server, and I suppose its a good thing that its taken this long, particularly for Cognos users who have had to wait until version 8.4 to get support on the OS.

Microsoft seem to have taken note of all those who complained that IIS security is too relaxed out of the box and as a result seem to have set it up so that in IIS7, everything is disabled by default.
I would say this is a good thing, because it is. Except if you are the poor Technical Consultant who has to keep installing on this version. Because it is not straight forward.

Like most things, the more you do it, the easier it becomes, but gone it seems are the days where you simply create a bunch of Virtual Directories and enable "All Unknown ISAPI Extensions", or if you are feeling a little more security conscious then set up the specific .cgi or dll required to get Cognos going.

So what I can offer is a list of steps that can be used to get the IBM Cognos 8 BI or Planning suite up and running on Windows 2008 with IIS 7. What I am still trying to work out is if I am doing this for the benefit of anyone who finds this post, or if its just so I know where to find the instructions the next time I am scratching my head over why its not working the way I expect it to.

Steps:

Open IIS Manager

In the left Connections pane, open the server level, open Sites then right-click on Default Website, and click "Add Virtual Directory"

Enter "cognos8" for the alias and enter the path to the x:\Program Files\Cognos\c8\webcontent directory in Physical Path and then click on OK.

Right click on the cognos8 virtual directory and click "Add Virtual Directory" (this will create a sub-directory to cognos8)

Input "cgi-bin" for the Alias and enter the path to x:\Program Files\Cognos\c8\cgi-bin directory in Physical Path. Click OK.

Right click on the cognos8 virtual directory and again click "Add Virtual Directory"

Enter "help" for the Alias and enter the path to the x:\Program Files\Cognos\c8\webcontent\documentation directory in Physical Path. Click OK. You will now have the basic structure we are used to for Cognos 8

In the left Connections pane, select the server node, then double-click ISAPI and CGI Restrictions in the right hand side.

In the Actions section to the right, click Add, enter the path to either cognosisapi.dll or cognos.cgi depending on which you will use (it is recommended to use cognosisapi.dll for IIS installations as it provides better performance) ensure you have ticked the "Allow extension path to execute" box, then click OK.

In the left Connections pane, select the cgi-bin virtual directory, then double-click Handler Mappings in the right pane.

In the Actions pane click Add Module Mapping, then enter either "cognos.cgi" or "cognosisapi.dll" for the Request Path, choose either CGIModule or ISAPIModule for the Module, give it an identifiable name like "CGI-cognos" then click OK.

In order for Cognos Administration to function properly, the directive added to the IIS configuration file by step 11 has to be edited manually. Depending on how IIS is set up, this will have been written either to C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationhost.config or to "<cognos_home>/c8/cgi-bin/web.config. Check those files for the following entry:

<add modules="CgiModule" name="CGI-cognos" path=".cgi" resourcetype="Unspecified" />

add allowPathInfo="true" to it like this:

<add name="CGI-cognos" path=".cgi" verb="*" modules="CgiModule" resourceType="Unspecified" allowPathInfo="true" />

Optionally, if appropriate, in addition to the above steps, when running IIS on a Windows 2008 Server 64-bit installation, you will need to configure the default application pool for the Cognos cgi-bin directory that permits 32-bit applications to execute.

Right hand click on "Default Application Pool" and select "Advanced Settings", when the window opens up, change the property for "Enable 32-bit Applications" to "True".

So as you can see, its hardly rocket science, but then it is a hell of a lot more hard work than it used to be under Windows 2003.

IBM Cognos 64bit Oracle Woes!

2010-03-19T14:43:00.001Z

...Phew... what a title. But I think it correctly describes (without the use of my signature bad-language) the state of affairs during yesterday's Technical Consultancy assignment.

A seemingly straight forward, albeit last minute engagement to install IBM Cognos 8.4 Business Intelligence to a single server turned into at least half a day of head scratching, in no small part thanks to the following unexpected requirements:

To run on a 64-bit Server
Which was also Windows 2008
Which required a connection to datasources on Oracle 10g

None of this should have been a problem in its self, and in fact, most of it did not cause any problems beyond having to download the correct 64-bit enabled version of IBM Cognos 8.4.1 Business Intelligence rather than the supplied 8.4 32-bit version. Of course, Windows 2008 Server or more specifically, the use of IIS7 does indeed make things trickier (perhaps another post on this to come?) but the real problem was finding the right version of the Oracle client to allow connection to our Oracle data server.

The customer had previously used the Oracle 9.2 client with their old Cognos server and had decided that as this worked in the past they would proceed with this version on the new server. This turned out to be the first mistake.

Lesson Number 1: Oracle 9.2 client does not play well on Windows 2008 Server; in fact, after it had installed, removal required that we run the OUI (Oracle installer) in XP Compatibility Mode just to get rid of it.

The error message we encountered when trying to test a new datasource connection was:

ORA-12154:TNS:Could not resolve service name

This was unusual because we could use the Oracle command line tools to TNSPING and SQLPlus into the instance. So we went looking for a 10g client, 64-bit naturally, because we had a 64-bit OS. After 30 minutes downloading we tried to install this, it did not run. So for a while we wondered why this may be before turning to trusty Google to tell us that we actually needed to search for a Windows 2008 certified version of the Oracle 10g client. In 64-bit. The link is here should you need the download:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/oracle10g/htdocs/10204_winx64_vista_win2k8.html

So we waited another 30 minutes for the download to complete.

This one installed perfectly, hooray! We were now ready to test creating the Datasource connection in Cognos 8.

Damn, an error. Again. But this one was different so we were making progress right?

QE-DEF-0285 Logon failure.
QE-DEF-0325 The cause of the logon failure is:
QE-DEF-0068 Unable to connect to at least one database during a
multi-database attach to 1 database(s) in:
[Database Name]

UDA-SQL-0432 Unable to locate the gateway "cogudaor".

Ok, what does this mean? Well, back to Google we went and found that the answer was quite simple in fact. We had the wrong Oracle client. Again. This was something that had crossed my mind as the 64-bit version of IBM Cognos 8.4.1 is not entirely 64-bit. Just parts of it are. So we need the right version of the Oracle client for the right bits of Cognos to talk to. This happened to be the 32-bit version. But specifically, a Windows 2008 certified 32-bit version.

30 minutes of download later... (here is the link...)

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/oracle10g/htdocs/10203vista.html

Finally it worked! So the end result is, for 64-bit IBM Cognos BI on a 64-bit Windows 2008 Server to be able to connect to an Oracle instance we need 32-bit Oracle client software!

I wonder why I didn't think of that first!

TM1 - Ahem, technical issues...

2010-03-15T16:47:00.002Z

There has been quite a bit of TM1 work about lately, most interesting of all is the latest 9.5 work with the TM1 Contributor component. It's been somewhat easier to implement within the localised VMware environments with no complicated Active Directory or anything like that to get in the way but even so, its not exactly rocket science... or is it?

I mean, its really giving me a bit of a rough time on a particular customer implementation that I am working on right now, its just not playing nice. On the surface it is all working nicely. Navigating around, looking at the web etc. But just you try publish an application to Contributor... oh yes... and that's where it starts giving a headache.

First of all it spend a long while complaining that you really do want to be using "IntegratedSecurityMode=5" with TM1 Contributor. Ok, thats a fair point. What I had actually done was mistakenly put it to "IntegratedSecurityMode=4" - this I could not resolve for even when the setting had been corrected, TM1 still wanted to tell me that I can't use 4. I got around it in the end by copying the sample application from another installation over to the problematic server. But now its complaining again and I have my work cut out for me.

The very annoying error is some JAVA.NULL.EXCEPTION.POINTER or some thing similar. Seems to only happen with the Planning Sample App for now anyway as I just got it to work with the customer's own data. #win!