#315 – DMSViewer

The PeopleSoft Administrator Podcast hosted by Dan Iverson and Kyle Benson

This week on the podcast, Dan revisits a tip for debugging Change Assistant issues and a replacement for the ls command, and Kyle talks about the new PeopleTools 8.59 Infra-DPK.

Show Notes

#264 – 8.59 Planned Features


This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan look through the PeopleTools 8.59 Planned Features and highlight the changes they are excited to see.

Show Notes

PeopleTools Planned Features and Enhancements

  • Life Cycle Management @ 5:00
  • Integration @ 16:15
  • User Interface @ 19:30
  • Configuration @ 24:00
  • Search @ 27:00
  • Security and Privacy @ 32:30
  • Monitoring @ 34:00

#188 – Maintenance Tiles


This week on the podcast, Kyle follows up on his Maintenance Tiles work and explains why he rewrote it using Portal Registry APIs. Kyle also shares an issue with Rich Text Editor images and Dan shares another “Adventures in MOS”.

Show Notes

#173 – Trace Wizard


This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan discuss Integration Broker Queue Partitioning and why you might want to use it. Dan shares an edge case with Change Assistants new modes, and then Dan and Kyle talk about the wonderful tool Trace Wizard.

Show Notes

#168 – Subsequent Pass


This week on the podcast, Dan shares some changes when applying Change Packages with PeopleTools 8.57. He explains the new Subsequent Pass mode and what changed with the Move to Production mode. Kyle shares some changes with PT_COMMON, and then Dan and Kyle discuss serer naming conventions.

Show Notes

Advanced PeopleSoft Administration – OpenWorld 2018

This week Kyle and I presented at OpenWorld 2018. Our session talked about how to take advantage of Deployment Packages, using ACM to simplify database refreshes, using psadmin-plus, and leveraging the new headless features of Change Assistant. You can view the slides here if you want to check out the presentation.

[wonderplugin_pdf src=”https://psadmin.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Advanced-PeopleSoft-Administration-OOW18-optimized.pdf” width=”100%” height=”600px” style=”border:0;”]

#137 – So Many Locations



This week on the podcast, Kyle follows up on his psc and psp bug, Dan doesn’t like the SSL setup in Linux and Kyle shares a great utility called chroot.

Show Notes

#121 – Under Review


That’s right, its another Change Assistant episode. Dan shares some updates to Change Assistant in 8.56, some 8.57 speculation, and applying PeopleTools Upgrades headlessly. Kyle shares an ACM discovery, and the PeopleTools Idea Space updates.

Show Notes

#119 – Installing Change Assistant


This week on the podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about cloud provisioning tools and how they could work for PeopleSoft Admins, Mike Ripley’s POC for securing WebLogic, and changes to the Change Assistant installation process.

Show Notes

Change Assistant 8.56 Installation Changes

Starting in Change Assistant 8.56, a new file is used to track the installations of Change Assistant, C:\Windows\PeoplesoftCA.txt. While Change Assistant 8.55 let us install multiple versions at the same time, 8.56 now tracks which your Change Assistant installations.

C:\Windows\PeoplesoftCA.txt

1 8.56.05  c:\psft\ca\hr025-8.56.05
2 8.56.05  c:\psft\ca\hrtst-8.56.05

The Change Assistant installer scripts set the path for the file. On Windows, is uses the WINDIR environment variable and on Linux it generates a temporary folder.

if isWin() :
  winpath = os.environ['WINDIR']
else :
  winpath = tempfile.gettempdir()

The C:\Windows location doens’t seem like the best place to store this file though. C:\Windows is for Windows files, not for vendor configuration. I’d like to see this stored in a better location, like C:\ProgramData\Peoplesoft.

If you run into errors when installing Change Assistant, especially in early releases of 8.56, try deleting the PeoplesoftCA.txt file. Earlier versions of Change Assistant used this format of the file (this is from Change Assistant 8.56.03):

INSTALL_PATH=c:\psft\ca\hr024-8.56.03

There are multiple ways to install Change Assistant with 8.56.

  1. tools_client\setupPTClient.bat on the PeopleSoft Image
  2. Use the setup.bat file under PS_HOME\setup\PsCA
  3. Silent Install option:

    .\silentInstall.bat c:\psft\ca\hr025-8.56.05 NEW NOBACKUP
    .\silentInstall.bat c:\psft\ca\hcmpum UPGRADE NOBACKUP
    

A few changes to the installation process:

  1. Installing an older version of Change Assistant will error if the PeoplesoftCA.txt has a newer version in it.
  2. The PeopleTools Installation Guide for 8.56 references the installer as setup\PsCA\installCA.exe, but in the latest 8.56.05 client tools that file does not exist.
  3. Instead, there is a setup.bat script to perform the installation.
  4. At OpenWorld, we heard that 8.56 included Change Assistant for Linux but you had to look for it. Now we have a setup.sh script for Change Assistant on Linux.
  5. The installation process is powered by Python, not an installation wizard. This follows suit with the DPK changes and supports multiple platforms.