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Former Member


I want preface this blog with the disclaimer that I am just beginning my tenure as a new BI admin.  I started our having some exposure to the CMC on BOE 3.1 (Windows) and also have upper-intermediate skills on the Linux platform.  From there, I took my notebook to Tech Ed to attend some of their workshops on upgrading from 3.1 to BI 4.X (great stuff) and then attended in-classroom training.  I took BOE330 - SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform: Designing and Deploying a Solution (I strongly recommend it for any admin level who is going to install BI 4.X).  I also took a class on Tomcat to help me with configuration of the Web App platfom.  Everything else I know about BI 4.1 (and Tomcat) has come from trial and error and reading lots of articles out of the knowledge base.

 

My general experience with the documentation for BI 4.X is that it is generally Windows-centric (some stuff is universal, but is can still be challenging).  I did, however, find some especially helpful resources for Linux installations (and for rank newbies like myself).

 

First off, I recommend reading the pattern books.  They are a great resource to see how other people did it.  One of the references I used a great deal of is below:

 

Linux System Landscape Overview - Business Intelligence (BusinessObjects) - SCN Wiki

 

Here's an interesting read on Virtualizing your BI installation:

Virtualizing SAP BusinessObjects BI 4

 

And a good resource on Sizing:

Sizing and Deploying SAP BI 4 and SAP Lumira

The sizing information provided above is even more useful if you take the BOE330 course!

 

My best resource for the actual install (apart from the provided admin and install guides) came from this resource:

Installing SAP BI 4.1 SP01 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x Step-by-step

 

Although the PAM guide is a pretty good guide for compatibility, I ran into a bug that was just recently fixed.  If you had Red Hat 6.6 installed, you couldn't run Crystal 2001/2013 reports on BI 4.1 SP5.  See SAP Note 2098659 for which patch version are supposed to have fixed that.

 

Another Gem from the Pattern Books explains how to configure a reverse proxy in Apache and Tomcat:

Configuring the reverse proxy - Business Intelligence (BusinessObjects) - SCN Wiki

 

For some reason getting all of my logs in one place was a challenge.  Some excellent resources on a couple quirky settings I found are as follows:

SAP Note 1829761 - How-To: Configure Location of BI4.0 Web Application Log Files

SAP Note 2066722 - How to stop outputting or change log level about TraceLog_*_trace.glf files under Tomcat directly

 

Configuring both 32-bit and 64-bit oracle drivers seems to be a challenge for Windows and Linux folks alike.  I used this article as a reference for some suggestions:

BOBI 4.1 SP2 Oracle client installation on server | SCN

 

In the end, here's what I put in my BI users' .kshrc file as it applies to Oracle:

export ORACLE_BASE=/oracle

export ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/<my 64 bit install>

export ORACLE_HOME32=/oracle/<my 32 bit install>

export TNS_ADMIN=<the directory I put my tnsnames.ora in>

if [ "$LIBPATH" = "" ]

then

export LIBPATH=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib:${ORACLE_HOME32}/lib:$BINDIR

else

export LIBPATH=${LIBPATH}:${ORACLE_HOME}/lib:${ORACLE_HOME32}/lib:$BINDIR

fi

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBPATH

export BOE_USE_32BIT_ENV_FOR=ORACLE_HOME

 

The above worked for me, your mileage may vary.

 

These are the best resources I have come across for large hurdles and minor annoyances that I have come across so far in development.  As I march towards production, I will add things as I find them.

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