It’s a straightforward task to lock the accounts, but once you have your security setup in place and your own template user profiles to clone then these ‘example’ accounts no longer serve any purpose. Here’s an easy way to delete them.

First of all, a warning. Before you delete anything make sure that you have adequate backups and have performed a trial restore recently.

For a little while now (at least from Tools 8.49) there has been functionality to delete inactive users. It classes an inactive user as one who hasn’t logged on for a set amount of days (using the LASTSIGNONDTTM field on PSOPRDEFN). You can check for user profiles that haven’t logged in for a long time (say, 2 years) using SQL like this:

select OPRID
     , LASTSIGNONDTTM
  from PSOPRDEFN 
 where LASTSIGNONDTTM <= sysdate-730

(note: sysdate-730 is approximately 2 years ago)

You’ll probably find that the list contains none of your users, but a lot of the ‘example’ accounts. These are the accounts that will be purged, so make sure that you’re happy that there are no important accounts in the list.

There are also a lot of example user profiles that have never signed in who therefore have a null LASTSIGNONDTTM. These need to be updated so that the process will also purge them:

update PSOPRDEFN 
   set LASTSIGNONDTTM = '01-JAN-01 00.00.00.000000000' 
 where LASTSIGNONDTTM is null

Once you’re happy with the purge list, we need to setup the process. Go to:

PeopleTools > Security > Password Configuration > Password Controls

Under the Purge User Profiles heading enter the amount of days that you’ve chosen (730 in my example) and click Save.

Then either click the Schedule button, or go to:

PeopleTools > Security > User Profiles > Purge Inactive User Profiles

Select a Run Control ID and run the Purge process. It’s not particularly fast (as it’s done via CI), but if you run the following piece of SQL you’ll be able to see your unneeded OPRIDs slowly disappearing:

select count(OPRID) 
  from PSOPRDEFN 
 where LASTSIGNONDTTM <= sysdate-730

The advantages that this setup gives us are:

• Global access (we don’t need to be in a certain office or use a VPN to get to PeopleSoft)
• Flexibility (we don’t need to buy all of the kit in advance and then wait a month for the servers to arrive)
• Hourly pricing (you only pay for the server when it’s booted)
• Processing power (we’ve found that the hardware performs pretty well compared to other – more traditional – hosting providers)
• Price (the amount of horsepower you get for your money compares well)
• Frighteningly fast bandwidth (want to download the latest Tools patch … it’ll only take a few minutes!)

We’ve been using Windows 2008 and MS SQL 2008, however there’s nothing stopping anyone going Linux/Oracle.  We are running 7 environments with all of the PeopleSoft tiers on a single server with the following specs:

High-Memory Extra Large Instance

17.1 GB of memory
6.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
420 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform

All things considered, we’re pretty pleased with how it has gone.  There have been some issues however:

- VPN access:

I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with Windows RRAS (Routing and Remote Access) trying to get a reasonable VPN for developers to use to access the backend (SQL Server Management Studio, App Designer etc).  Although I can get the VPN to work, the server frequently disappeared from the network (even other servers in the Amazon Cloud couldn’t ping it).  There are many others on the Amazon forums with the same issue, so I gave up and used a different route for developer access (RDP into smaller ‘satellite’ servers with PeopleTools already installed).

- 3-Tier Debugger

This doesn’t seem to work between the satellite servers and the PeopleSoft server, even with all firewalls turned off.  I’ve never had a problem configuring this before and I’m at a loss to explain why it doesn’t work.  We have a perfectly acceptable workaround so this isn’t a big problem.

- Config Manager Settings

On some of the servers the Config Manager settings don’t persist, even when logged in as an Administrator (and running the app as administrator).

I’ll probably add to this post over time as we get more experience with it, and I’d be interested to hear from others who’ve been trying similar things.

As well as Automatic, Manual and Disabled, there is now an Automatic (Delayed) option.

David Kurtz has spoken about using service dependencies, but I just want my App Server and Process Scheduler to start after the intial flurry of start-up activity has finished and everything else has calmed down.

Services that have a delayed start still start automatically, they just wait until all the services that aren’t delayed to finish before firing up.

It works a treat!

VMWare Server is great for creating the VMs, and you need it while you’re adding virtual disks etc. However once the VM is in place it may be worthwhile switching to VMWare Player. The Player is slightly faster but you can’t perform maintenance like add disks when using it. Also, they don’t co-exist on the same client machine, it’s either one or the other. To be honest, I just uninstall and install as it doesn’t take that long.

The issue I faced, and the reason for this post is that VMWare Server lets the user configure the IP Address assignments and DHCP ranges from within the application, while VMWare player doesn’t. This is a bit of an issue if you have a VM that you’ve configured with a static IP address in a non-default range, then when you switch to VMWare Player the static IP isn’t in the default range.

The secret to know is that the ability is still there, you just have to go looking for it. The utility you need is ‘vmnetcfg.exe’ and it’s under the VMWare Player install directory (i.e. ‘C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player’). From here you can configure the IP Ranges to be whatever you wish.

There was a bit of a clamour when Microsoft bought them out, but it appears these must-have tools are still available for free. They’re now hosted in a file share for easy access:

http://live.sysinternals.com/

If you do boot the App Server without changing the port you’ll get an error message:

exec PSRENSRV -A -- -C psappsrv.cfg -D PADMO -S PSRENSRV : CMDTUX_CAT:1685: ERROR: Application initialization failure

tmboot: CMDTUX_CAT:827: ERROR: Fatal error encountered; initiating user error handler


tmshutdown -qy

OK, you think. I know what that is, it must be a port clash. So you reconfigure the port in PSADMIN and then try to boot it again. Same error. Checking the REN Server log gives the following clue:

(ERROR) nssock: Cannot listen on port 7180. The port may already be in use.

It’s still looking on port 7180, not the new port!

The missing step is to update the database, as the port is stored there also:

UPDATE PSREN SET PORT_NUM = 7185, SSLPORT_NUM = 7148

You should then find you App Server and Ren Server boot fine.

It sounds as though Oracle is at least aware of the problem as they’re integrating PeopleSoft with Oracle Enterprise Manager, which is great. However it requires a separate license and if you’re working on a client that doesn’t have a whole lot of other Oracle software it’s a big ask when PSAdmin will accomplish the same tasks anyway. You may even be able to run it for free if some of your stack runs on Linux – I can’t remember the exact details of the press release – but not all clients want to go that way, and if I just want a nice way of managing a VM on my laptop it’s overkill.

I did go part of the way down this route myself a few years back with something I called the PSAdmin GUI, it’s free and it’s available here. However once I had a front end for the ‘starting and stopping’ side of PSAdmin I stopped developing it. I didn’t think anywhere near as big as these guys have.

Once you’ve read the blog post, check out the flash demo:

http://blog.greysparling.com/2007/10/better-way-to-manage-peoplesoft-windows.html

The welcome message is stored on a per user basis, it is set using the ‘Personalize Content’ link on the Homepage, and it is stored in the table PSPRUHDEFN. If updated via SQL, it won’t appear instantly unless you either bounce the App Server (and clear the cache) or increment the versions in PSVERSION and PSLOCK. There is an (Oracle) sql script to update the message – so it appears instantly – at the foot of this post.

A more constructive use of the greeting would be to alter it slightly. Particularly during development and testing it would be useful to display the logged on user and the environment name. An extremely simple change to a Tools object (yes, I know, but it’s such a small change that the upgrade implications will be minimal) allows this.

There are two steps, output the user/database in the greeting and make the message appear on every page, not just the Homepage.

1. Output the user/database in the greeting

Open Application Package PT_BRANDING, Application Class BrandingBase, Method GetIScriptHPDefaultHdrHTML.

Replace:
Greeting = &Portal.Homepage.Greeting;

With:
/* <name> – 13/06/07 – Adding user and environment to branding */
/* &Greeting = &Portal.Homepage.Greeting; */
&Greeting = %UserId | ” on ” | %DbName;
/* <name> – End */

2) Make the message appear on every page, not just the Homepage.

If you want it to display on all pages, you need to edit Application Package PT_BRANDING, Application Class BrandingBase, Method GetUniHeaderHTML and GetUniHeaderHTML_PIA.

Add the following just before the ‘If &navTheme.isNS4x()’:
/* <name> – 13/06/07 – Adding user and environment to branding */
&Greeting = %UserId | ” on ” | %DbName;
/* <name> – End */

Oracle SQL Script to update the message for a single user

–===================================================================
define portal=’EMPLOYEE’
define oprid=’<oprid>’
define message=’<desired message>’

UPDATE PSLOCK SET VERSION = VERSION + 1 WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME IN (‘CRM’, ‘PRUH’);

DELETE FROM PSPRUHDEFN WHERE PORTAL_NAME = ‘&portal’ AND OPRID = ‘&oprid’;
DELETE FROM PSPRUHTAB WHERE PORTAL_NAME = ‘&portal’ AND OPRID = ‘&oprid’;
DELETE FROM PSPRUHTABPGLT WHERE PORTAL_NAME = ‘&portal’ AND OPRID = ‘&oprid’;
DELETE FROM PSPRUHPERSPGLT WHERE PORTAL_NAME = ‘&portal’ AND OPRID = ‘&oprid’;
DELETE FROM PSPRUHDEL WHERE PORTAL_NAME = ‘&portal’ AND OPRID = ‘&oprid’;

INSERT INTO PSPRUHDEFN ( LASTUPDDTTM, LASTUPDOPRID, OBJECTOWNERID, VERSION, PORTAL_NAME, OPRID, PORTAL_GREETING254)
SELECT sysdate, ‘&oprid’, ‘ ‘, VERSION, ‘&portal’, ‘&oprid’, ‘&message’
FROM PSLOCK WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘PRUH’;

INSERT INTO PSPRUHTAB ( PORTAL_NAME, OPRID, PORTAL_OBJNAME, PORTAL_SEQ_NUM, PORTAL_LABEL, PORTAL_COLLAYOUT, PORTAL_STG_NAME)
VALUES ( ‘&portal’, ‘&oprid’, ‘DEFAULT’, 0, ‘My Page’, 3, ‘PR_EMPLOYEE_DEFAULT’);

INSERT INTO PSPRUHTABPGLT ( PORTAL_NAME, OPRID, PORTAL_OBJNAME, PORTAL_OBJNAME_PGT, PORTAL_COL_NUM, PORTAL_ROW_NUM, PORTAL_MINIMIZE)
VALUES ( ‘&portal’, ‘&oprid’, ‘DEFAULT’, ‘MENU’, 1, 1, 0);

UPDATE PSVERSION SET VERSION = VERSION + 1 WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘SYS’;
UPDATE PSLOCK SET VERSION = (SELECT VERSION FROM PSLOCK WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘CRM’) WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘CRM’;
UPDATE PSLOCK SET VERSION = (SELECT VERSION FROM PSLOCK WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘PRUH’) WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘PRUH’;
UPDATE PSVERSION SET VERSION = (SELECT VERSION FROM PSLOCK WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘CRM’) WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘CRM’;
UPDATE PSVERSION SET VERSION = (SELECT VERSION FROM PSLOCK WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘PRUH’) WHERE OBJECTTYPENAME = ‘PRUH’;
–===================================================================

The post was on IT Toolbox (peoplesoft.ittoolbox.com) and the poster was a guy called Neil Pak (at least that’s what the email said, I guess his real name could be anything).

The issue being discussed was one that’ll be familiar to all developers who’ve written a few App Engines in their time – needing to bounce the Process Scheduler to clear the cache, to get the Process Scheduler to use the latest changes. Sometimes it picks them up, sometimes it doesn’t, particularly if you’re changing an existing object – and for me this has happened mostly with SQL Objects.

The normal solution is to bounce the Process Scheduler and clear the cache, however this isn’t possible all the time. Perhaps there’s a long-running job that’s processing, or perhaps your friendly DBA/SysAdmin is busy getting a cuppa etc. Other times I’ve just cloned the SQL Object in question and appended a digit to the object name and used that version instead. This works also, but you do tend to end up with a stack of similarly named SQL Objects in your project.

Neil’s solution – and you’ll need access to the Process Scheduler server for this – is to delete some specific cache files. To quote Neil:

I did some testing and found that, at least for app engines that finished successfully, I could go in and delete the .dat and .key files (but not the cache.lok) and basically the cache was deleted … One could probably just delete all the .key and .dat files without much regard to which folder it was since any files still in use would not delete.

Note: I haven’t tested this myself yet.

Edit:

The original post did say that this was tested with the AESRVs disabled.  I had a quick test today and couldn’t delete any of the cache files under the AESRV directories.  I guess the processes keep them locked, or perhaps it was just that we had lots running.   I’ll update this post again if I find out more.

Having a quick browse on Customer Connection it looks as though it’s a release to get 3rd party software up to date, rather than to introduce new functionality (in the way that Tools 8.48 did).

Details of software requirements here:

http://www4.peoplesoft.com/psdb.nsf/0/74DAD3F64698E696882571EE0083C128?OpenDocument

(customer connection logon needed)

Update:

Tools 8.49 has been released. Details here:

http://www.peoplesoft.com/corp/en/support/roadmap/documents.jsp?doc=7E371AF2B1AAE3CC882570D0007E6E5C