by Dan Iverson

ps-availability Version 2.0

About a year ago, I posted a project to check on the status of all our PeopleSoft environments. Our status page has become an important part of monitoring our environments. I check that page every morning and the email alerts let me be proactive in addressing environment issues. We also embedded the status page into our support teams homepage, so any team member can quickly see the status of environments.

I made some improvements to the script over the last year and am releasing them as version 2.0. The improvements for version 2.0 are:

  • Checking for Stale process schedulers. In version 1, I simply grabbed the process scheduler status and reported on that. But, if your scheduler crashes it won’t update the server status table. So, you can get situations where the page says your scheduler is running but it’s not. In version 2.0, you can configure a Stale Interval to compare the last updated time. If the last update is greater than the interval, it will report the scheduler as “Stale”.
  • I removed the interim Markdown tables that were used to create the HTML table, which let me remove the Redcarpet gem dependency. In version 2.0, the HTML tables are built as the data is collected. This let’s the script dynamically add classes for formatting, but it also lets us build more complex tables.
  • IB Domain Status reporting is in version 2.0. The status of the IB domains doesn’t impact the notifications (partly because we have some domains Inactive on purpose), but you can click on an environment row to see a report from the IB Domains page. The row embeds a table with your IB domain status so you can quickly check the status.
  • You can specify a homepage check for both Classic and Fluid so you don’t have to use the same title for both homepages. This is also useful if you are starting to roll out Fluid in some environments, but have Classic in others.

Here is a screenshot of the new status page:

version2

There are three new configuration options (in the psavailability.rb script – on the list for future improvements) with version 2.0:

  • Fluid Homepage Title Check (default: Homepage)
  • Time Zone (default: US Central)
  • Stale Interval (default: 10 minutes)

Go visit the GitHub repository to download the project and get started.

by Dan Iverson

#45 – Go-Live Weekends

This week Dan talks about his 8.55 Go-Live weekend, simplifying patch download with getMOSPatch, and using Kyle’s Maintenance Backdoor. Then Kyle and Dan discuss strategies and tips to make Go-Live weekends successful.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

You can listen to the podcast here on psadmin.io or subscribe with your favorite podcast player using the URL below, or subscribe in iTunes.

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Show Notes

by Kyle Benson

Maintenance Page with Backdoor Login

A standard requirement when doing PeopleSoft maintenance is to change the normal sign in page. When the system is offline, we often like to display a maintenance page that informs users that the system will be down and prevents them from logging in. This is done easily enough by changing the signin.html page, adding a message and removing the login form.

However, there is one more requirement that is a little tricky. Once the maintenance is complete, there are often tasks that need to be completed before handing the system back to the end users. These can be configuration changes, running batch processes or simply completing validation that everything was applied correctly and is in working order. How can the core team sign on to the system and complete these tasks, all while preventing end user access?

I recently came up with a bit of JavaScript that gave us a backdoor to the system during our last PeopleTools upgrade. What the script does is hide the login form on the sign in page, preventing login.  The trick was that our core team knew the key to the backdoor. After the sign in page would load, when they pressed Ctrl+Space the login form would be reveled. The combination of keys was only known to the team, so they were the only ones able to get in. Keep in mind if you had some crafty end users this could obviously be worked around, but it did the trick for us.

The JavaScript and HTML to accomplish this is listed below.  Adding the script and HTML changes to your signin.html page is pretty straight forward. First include the file containing the JavaScript, or write it inline. You then need to wrap your login form elements in a <div> with an id=loginbox. I would suggest starting before the <div> containing ptLabelUserid and ending after the <div> containing the submit button. Lastly, you need to add hideLogin(true); to the body onload attribute.

Keep in mind the key doesn’t have to be Ctrl+Space, it can be any key combination really.You will see in the comments of the script a link to information about other keycodes that can be used.

Updated: 03/20/2023 There is an updated version of the JavaScript and HTML here that works with PeopleTools 8.60 in this Github Gist

Updated: 10/11/2016 Instead of hard coding a true value for your hideLogin() parameter, why not use a Custom Property set in the Web Profile? You can create any Custom Property you would like, for example: login.isLoginHidden and set to true. Then reference the property in your signin.hmtl page like this: hideLogin("<%=login.isLoginHidden%>"). This will allow you to toggle the hide login functionality by updating the web profile and bouncing the server.

Click here to see a working demo. Enjoy!