In my
blog about updating to BI 4.2 Support Pack 4, I mention there is a gotcha caused by the crypto libraries being updated. This means that you
have to update your server and clients all in one go, since an older client technically can't connect to a newer server. You can't get away with an unsupported workflow where you could update the server first and then gradually update the clients over time. In this blog I share a theoretical solution. It is completely unsupported and untested but it could be a workaround this problem.
I wrote:
Any client ‘less than’ BI 4.2 Support Pack 4 connecting to a server ‘greater than or equal’ to BI 4.2 Support Pack 4 will not work. This isn’t supported, but many organisations update the server first (rule 1 above) and the later update the clients. So for a short period of time, the clients are one (or two) Support Pack versions lower than the server. Whilst not supported, with BI 4.2 SP4 this really won’t work meaning all server and all clients must be updated to the same version in one go. No gradual update for clients. Once you’re on BI 4.2 SP4 then future updates, to say BI 4.2 SP5, it should work again, but unsupported as usual!
Although
completely unsupported there could be a way to allow your old clients (less than BI 4.2 SP4) to communicate with a BI 4.2 Support Pack 4 server!
This has
not been tested or validated by SAP in anyway whatsoever, so anything I mention here and you do is completely
at your own risk! It’s therefore even more important to do a
backup before you replace files!
Copy these 3 files from a BI 4.2 Support Pack 4 machine to your older BI 4.2 Support Pack 3 machine:
<INSTALL_DIR>\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\java\lib\bundles
com.businessobjects.bcm.jar
com.businessobjects.boesdk.jar
com.businessobjects.corba.jar
Doing so will replace rsa, bcm, sdk, corba jars and this should,
at least in theory, allow an old client to connect to a BI 4.2 SP4 server.
Did I mention this
isn’t supported and that this
hasn’t been tested or validated by SAP in any way?! You do this at your own risk.
If you do decide to give this a go, please do post your feedback to let other customers know if it worked for you or not. Please post the product versions you used.
Matthew (
@MattShaw_on_BI)
