Smart Thinking Newsletter

Is your ERP clock running out?

Older ERP Systems may feel like they can go forever, but as they age a plan for replacement needs to be considered – to improve reliability, increase usability, and get your systems ready for the next generation of doing business. Check out some tips, courtesy of…

I was putting a Campus Solutions Bundle on a system for a client and as per usual PeopleSoft delivered an emergency ISIR patch to follow up.  However, this time when I went to apply the ISIR patch after the fact Change Assistant was complaining that the pre-requisite bundle was not applied yet.  Now I know my memory is bad, but it was just the other day, I know I put the patch on this environment.

First, I thought cache, so I stopped all the agents and all the environments cleared the cache and reset the PSEM Agents & Hub.  Fired it back up and still the same error.  I even reset the GUID on PSOPTIONS.

I checked the PS_MAINTENANCE_LOG and clearly the update I put on is there, however, it looks a little different on one of the fields for other bundles.  The FIXOPRID for the bundle was PS and not PPLSOFT like the other bundles.  Sure enough I did a

UPDATE PS_MAINTENANCE_LOG SET FIXOPRID = ‘PPLSOFT’ WHERE UPDATE_ID = ‘{CSBundle##}’

Re-ran the check and sure enough all is right in the world again.  All pre-requisites need to have the FIXOPRID be PPLSOFT otherwise things don’t go as planned.

Here is an oldie that loves to surface every once in awhile.  I was fixing some Windows Process Schedulers today so that Crystal would work properly.  I was able to get DEMO working but when I went to one of the test environments I got a connection error, login was denied.  I always love how there are some crazy oddities to 3rd Party programs with PeopleSoft.  Firstly, Crystal is still a 32 bit application even though as of 8.53 PeopleTools all the PeopleSoft connections are 64 bit.  If you are wondering yes SQR is still 32 bit as well. 🙂

However, the login was being denied because there was multiple entries in the PSACCESSPRFL table, and several of them were invalid, and Crystal likes to “randomly”  pick an entry from the table as it does not have a where clause associated with its connection.  So in this case I simply changed all the symbolic ids to use the same accessid and password, however, if you really do need to have multiple accessids, make sure they have the right access.

Okay, I have to say, a few things in this world drive me crazy, okay maybe a little more than a few.  Now I know this won’t apply to most people as they probably only have to ever VPN into one place, but for the folks in this world that VPN into multiple places, I often find that my Cisco Anywhere client tool often gets updated.  The problem I often find is that my default URL gets changed and the drop down never works, so I end up memorizing bizarre VPN urls for my various clients.

I just want to be able to have my most common client be first in the list and ideally have my other VPN urls in the drop down.  So I a fit of frustration I did a Google search yesterday and found how to change the default URL.  Look for the file preferences.xml which should be in your c:\users\{youruserid}\appdata\local\cisco\Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client\ folder, I had some issues finding this file as it might be in the roaming folder instead of local, and it might just be hidden.  In the file you can change the entry for:  DefaultHostName.

In order to get the drop down list to work properly, I found in my c:\programdata\cisco\Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client\Profile that there was an xml file that had my default profile in it.  In my trusty UltraEdit, I found the section for the ServerList and made a new HostEntry block for each of my VPN Servers.

<ServerList>
<HostEntry>
<HostName>{MyVPN-name-vpn1}</HostName>
<HostAddress>{MyVPN-address-vpn1}</HostAddress>
</HostEntry>
<HostEntry>
<HostName>{MyVPN-name-vpn2}</HostName>
<HostAddress>{MyVPN-address-vpn2}</HostAddress>
</HostEntry>
</ServerList>

Now my drop down box works.  Now I am a little bit happier. 🙂