SAP CPS – 1 silly way to create an obtuse error

Recently I was setting up a new CPS system that is yet to go live and I was running one of our bespoke setup jobs in the system.

It kept going straight to an “error” status in the system. There was no log associated with it and no stderr or anything to interrogate; no operator message; nothing to analyse.

I switched to the OS to take a peek around and eventually, thankfully, realised what mistake I’d made.

We’d setup the DataRootDirectory parameter on our ProcessServers in order to direct output/job-logs to a dedicated mounted UNIX FS…. however the permissions hadn’t been updated and it seems this is not something that gets caught/handled by the application layer. A permissions update and we were fine again.

So the moral of this fable, in a technological Aesop stylee – a person may think that the error is beyond their perception but they should always believe in their ability to have caused strange problems with inappropriate UNIX security.