Post-Install OBIEE Part I: Login problems for OBIEE BI Publisher

In my quest to cover all things Oracle, the latest adventure is to setup and configure a test environment on VMWare with OBIEE- Oracle Business Intelligence Suite for Oracle Enterprise Linux platform. I was able to setup OBIEE 10.1.3 for OEL 5 without too many issues. I did have to download and configure the jdk 1.5 from the java.sun.com website as OBIEE requires the latest jdk 1.5 as part of the installation. Like most of the core Oracle Enterprise products, Oracle Application Server (OAS) is at the heart of OBIEE as well as other key technologies such as E-Business. Everything went smooth after that and I was able to bring up the OBIEE database server control for Application Server.










Unfortunately, even though all of the key OBIEE services came online without incident, I was unable to login to the OBIEE BI Publisher site as Administrator using the default password of Administrator!





So, I had to solve this problem by restarting the OBIEE services script located under $ORACLE_HOME/setup as shown in the example below:




OK, one question that comes to mind is where does OBIEE store the passwords for access to BI publisher? Well, OBIEE stores its configuration for passwords in an XML formatted file called xml-server-config.xml which is located under $ORACLE_HOME/xmlp/XMLP/Admin/Configuration directory. Recall that we had to restart the OBIEE services on account of our login problem. Now, we see the correct default values for the Administrator account as shown in the below output for the xml-server-config.xml configuration file:




One word of caution- since this file is not encrypted, you want to be careful to restrict access to avoid any security vulnerability issues to sensitive data within OBIEE.

And now we can login as Administrator to our OBIEE BI Publisher site to perform administration tasks for managing our OBIEE BI dashboads.



I was able to run sample reports using the canned examples that come with OBIEE default installation. OBIEE really is the updated version of Siebel since Oracle purchased Siebel as part of the recent spending buyout spree.

We will cover additional key Oracle Fusion Middleware technical tips and tricks in upcoming installations such as the new Oracle Beehive Collaborate Suite as well as how to deploy the new Oracle SOA suite and Oracle Weblogic Application server. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Ben