Login issues with EAS

I got an email today from someone who had followed my installation tutorial for 11.1.1, had installed 11.1.1.2 based on my tutorial and is having trouble connecting with EAS. I thought I would blog it so other people can benefit from my response.

I often have the same problem on my laptop and have to restart the services. In my case, the root cause is that the Oracle TNS listener service goes to sleep when I suspend my laptop and does not wake back up. When this happens, I restart my services in this order:

1. Oracle database (only if it is not running)
2. Oracle TNS listener
3. OpenLDAP
4. Shared Services
5. Essbase Admin Services server

Once this is complete, I have no problems logging in. I am sure that if I had the Oracle piece running on something other than a laptop, I would not see these issues either.

The user also had some other questions relating to the app server / web server terminology in the Oracle docs. The embedded Tomcat server is the app server that is shipped out of the box. I expect that to change in the future due to the Oracle acquisition of WebLogic.

He also asked about the role of Microsoft IIS in the equation. IIS is not used in the Essbase stack (OpenLDAP / Shared Services / Essbase / Essbase Administration Services / Essbase Integration Server / Analytic Provider Services). I believe that some portions of the other Hyperion products may need it.

AVG Anti-Virus vs EAS

We use AVG anti-virus at our company. Last weekend, one of my developers was prompted to upgrade to the new version of AVG; installation was painless (or so we thought)..

A few hours later, he was working on a customer prototype of Dodeca and needed to look at the Essbase outline the customer had sent us. No matter what he tried, he could not connect to EAS and called me as I am, of course, the company expert in such matters. We pulled up (what I thought would be) a quick GotoMeeting and, after a couple of hours had not made much progress *except* that we determined the only thing that changed was that he had upgraded AVG. We tried to shutdown the EAS service and launch EAS server manually and, after searching through logs, we finally found where there was a JVM Binding Exception which meant that *something* else was running on port 10080, the default EAS Server port.

We ran netstat on his machine and confirmed it but, the strange thing was, there was no process ID associated with whatever program was running on the port. A quick check of the web got a couple of hits of people who had other problems with port 10080 and the new version of AVG. We had two choices: find what in AVG caused the problem or reconfigure EAS to run on a new port. My employee tracked down the AVG component, Web Shield and disabled it.



It is not likely that many EAS users will see this as it is doubtful they are running AVG on their EAS server. On the other hand, those people who have the entire Hyperion stack running on their laptops, like many of us Essbase geeks (er... professionals), might run into this. Hopefully this will save some of you some time. No charge (but I am willing to accept free coffees at Collaborate and Kaleidoscope!)