Smart Panda Newsletter – October 2014

Smart Thinking Newsletter

How to Avoid an ERP Cloud Migration Nightmare

Smart Panda - Hello Kitty Pumpkin
Forbes is great at putting together excellent resources for ERP users, and this one is no exception. Planning any type of ERP upgrade or migration can be complex, but it can quickly get out of hand if the proper steps aren’t taken – including deciding what to keep and what to change. Don’t get fooled by The Hello Kitty Witch.

RHEL: Set The TimeZone PeopleSoft Incorrectly Reporting Time

The other day, a trainer was in one of my new demo environments setting up for a demo and told me the time was wrong.  However, if you looked at the server the time was bang on except for the fact that it was using the UTC-0 Timezone, which is common for virtualized cloud server because what timezone you want is really up to you.

I was very surprised that PeopleSoft did NOT seem to acknowledge the servers timezone and adjust accordingly.  So in my case, the demo was in the eastern time zone, so I changed the server timezone to America/Toronto.  To do this, I found was a little less than straight forward:

server1 :>   cd /etc

server1 :>   mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.orig

server1 :>   ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto localtime

There are hundreds of timezones you can set to but for me that one worked great.  If I need to I can revert back to utc-0 by simply moving the localtime.orig back to localtime filename.  Once the change was made the database booted with the correct time and PeopleSoft worked correctly after that.  I tried to figure out from the support site why UTC-0 was not recognized but found no valid answers anywhere.

O-SES: SSL verification failure

Last week while working on a new install of O-SES for a development server, instead of using a dedicated SSL certificate we decided to use a wildcard certificate to reduce headaches.

When trying to build the PTPORTALREGISTRY index it failed with the error showing up in the web server logs:

####<Oct 3, 2014 3:18:25 PM EDT> <Warning> <Security> <OSESDEV> <search_server1> <FlexSecThread-16> <<anonymous>> <> <669085ede0c2399a:-42f78039:148d7454212:-8000-0000000000000031> <1412363905243> <BEA-090504> <Certificate chain received from osesdev.thesmartpanda.com – 111.142.22.208 failed hostname verification check. Certificate contained *.thesmartpanda.com but check expected osesdev.thesmartpanda.com>

Weblogic has a feature that validates the hostname when the web server is acting as a client.  Under the SSL settings for the PIA under the advanced options you can set the “Hostname Verification” to NONE.

weblogic_host_verification

After the change, re-ran the initial index builds and everything worked as expected.