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.
This week on the podcast, Dan talks about how his formative years in computing still affect him, Kyle shares some follow-up on deploying the latest PIs, and then Dan talks about using Postfix as an SMTP relay to improve email delivery in PeopleSoft.
This week on the podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about some older frameworks in PeopleSoft and why they didn’t catch on. Then Kyle shares some approaches to manage your PIs and why each solution might be a fit for you.
This week on the podcast, Dan shares some of his favorite musicians live virtual shows, Kyle discusses the difference between Fluid Homepages and Dashboards, and they also discuss the extended 8.56 support window.
This week on the podcast, Charlie Sinks joins us to talk about everything we learned at the Upper Midwest Regional User Group meeting. We talk about PeopleTools 8.56, changes in Lifecycle Management, Fluid adoption, Elasticsearch, Dan’s DPK session, and much more.
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.
This week on The PeopleSoft Administrator Podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about the psadmin.io Stylesheets, Enterprise Manager 13c, and new portal behavior in recent PeopleTools patches. Then, Kyle shares his thoughts about possibly changing Operating Systems.
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.
robocopy c:\temp\emptyFolder c:\oracle\weblogic\.patch_storage /MIRgetMOSPatch is a great utility for downloading patches from Oracle Support. The utility will log into Oracle Support for you and download patches you supply. All you need is the patch number, and your MOS credentials. And, version 2 of getMOSPatch is written in Java, so you can use it on any platform.
Let’s walk through a quick demo of downloading a recent PeopleSoft Image using getMOSPatch. We’ll be downloading the Windows NativeOS DPK for HR 9.2 Image 18, which is patch 23263167.
getMOSPatch.jar from GitHub. getMOSPatch.jar.java -jar getMOSPatch.jar patch=23263167 patch is a required parameter. You can specify multiple patches; make the patch values a comma separated list233P is the Windows 64-bit code, so I’m using that. The .getMOSPatch.cfg file will store the platform you last selected when running getMOSPatch.jar, so you won’t be prompted every time for the platform. To reset the stored code, add reset=yes to the command line.getMOSPatch will present a list of files available to download for the patch. In our case, we are selecting a PeopleSoft Image patch, so there will be 10 or more files. Use a comma separated list to specifiy the files you want to download. If you want to download all the files in the patch, you can use download=all in the command line.getMOSPatch will download the patches into your current directory.
Let’s clean up our first example so that we can easily download future PeopleSoft Images using only a patch number. If you haven’t run getMOSPatch yet, run it once to identify the platform code you will use.
Next, we’ll create our command for getMOSPatch to download all the PeopleSoft Image patch files for our platform. This example will download the Windows NativeOS DPK for HR 9.2 Image 18:
java -jar getMOSPatch.jar patch=23263167 platform=233P download=all MOSUser=<email>
When I run the command, we’ll only need to enter the password for your MOS account. getMOSPatch will download all the patch files we need for the PeopleSoft Image.
This week on the podcast, Kyle gives a recap of the Reconnect 2016 conference. Some of the highlights we discuss are a PUM Success Story, how to adopt Fluid, and SAML 2.0. Dan and Kyle also discuss the new PeopleSoft Image Videos and using WLST with the DPK.
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.
For those of you using the NativeOS Linux install for Update Images, you have probably come across this scenario. You start the DPK install and once you get to the Puppet installation section, the script comes to an abrupt end. What the heck! Looking in the log file, you quickly figure out your OS is missing some required packages. So now what?
In the PeopleSoft Deployment Packages for Update Images Installation document, task 2-3-3 walks you through how to get the required OS packages needed for Puppet. They make it clear that it is your job to obtain these packages and install them – you’re on your own. They then list a few steps on how to accomplish this. The steps pretty much come down to this:
$DPK_INSTALL/setup/psft-dpk-setup.logFollowing the steps is pretty straight forward, but I don’t like having to manually dig through a log file and pick out the missing OS Packages. So, what I did is write a little shell script to extract them for me. This script will generate the list of missing OS packages and write it to a file. After reviewing the list, you can then use this file for installing the packages.
Here are the steps I follow to ensure I have all the needed OS packages when installing NativeOS Linux DPKs. These steps assume your current directory is $DPK_INSTALL/setup.
grep "is needed by" psft-dpk-setup.log | awk '{print $1;}' >> os-packages.listvi os-packages.listsudo yum install $(cat os-packages.list)Unfortunately, you may have to repeat this process a few times to identify all the missing packages. Once I have gotten through a DPK install on a particular OS, I save off the os-packages.list file for safe keeping. I then make sure I install this list of packages to any new VM that I am doing a fresh DPK install on. Doing this before DPK installs will ensure we don’t see any missing OS package errors. I’m sure this list will need to be updated as time goes on and we see different versions of Puppet, etc in our DPKs.
Hopefully you found this post helpful! This little tidbit was pulled out of the PeopleSoft Deployment Package QuickStart course. Feel free to enroll in this FREE course today for more DPK goodness.
If you are using the VirtualBox DPK PeopleSoft Images, you may have noticed the Virtual Machine names are not descriptive. By default, the names use this pattern: SHELL_8_55_xx. This name is the PeopleTools version the image is based on, but it tells you nothing about the application release. I prefer to use a different naming standard for our VirtualBox PeopleSoft Images, like: HCMDB-8-55-03-017. This naming convention tells me what application (HCMDB), PeopleTools release (8-55-03), and image number (017) a vm is running.
You can change the name of a VirtualBox vm pretty easily. When the vm is stopped (the vm can’t be running, or in a paused state), click the Settings button or select Machine > Settings. In the Name field, change the vm name to something meaningful. This will change the label of the vm in VirtualBox, as well as the folder name on the machine. It will not change the name of the hard drive files.
When you run the VBox DPK bootstrap script, you get a question that asks if you want to “Import the PeopleSoft Appliance into VirtualBox”. If you answer “Yes”, the new vm will use the name SHELL_8_55_xx. You can shutdown the vm after it is configured and rename it at that time.
If you answer “No”, you can import the SHELL_8_55_xx.ova file manually. The import page in VirtualBox lets you set the name of the vm. Keep in mind, if you import it manually you will need to create a Shared Folder back to the DPK files.