As mentioned in my previous post on this topic, we need to configure BindPlane to read our files. I chose to use the file source as there was no prepared parser for PeopleSoft logs.

Configuration again

Application server and process Scheduler

On the application server there are three types of files. These are:

Application Logs

I set this up as a file, and added the following regex to split it into fields. This is wrapped for readability - in reality it is all on one line. The spaces are part of the regex, the newlines are not.

At present all our logs are in random files in random places in the operating system. I would like to see whether we can improve this. As an example of the problems caused by the current situation, if a user reports an issue, they normally don’t give a timestamp, so we have to assume the issue occurs say up to 20 minutes before the call was raised. Then we have to search the logs on the operating system for their user ID. As mentioned these logs are in various places. It isn’t easy to limit to a time span using standard operating system tools. Also we have a redundant architecture, meaning the users session could have been on any one of four web servers, and four application servers. The error could have happened on any of these 8 VMs.

Just a quick one this time. PeopleSoft has three different types of cache at the application server level, and here are some notes on it.

Unshared Cache

What it is

So called because each application server process creates it’s own cache under %PS_SERVDIR% which is by default $PS_CFG_HOME/domainname/CACHE/ Under here are directories for each process, e.g. PSAPPSRV_1 etc.

How to use it

This is the default type of cache. It is used if you configure

How I Test My Backups

I like to test my backups. It helps me sleep to know I could get my data back if the worst happened and it was scrambled by ransomware, or a bug in our code.

My sleep was rendered less peaceful when the restores suddenly started failing for no reason that I could understand. We use RMAN to backup and restore the data, and the script is fairly simple - it effectively says to restore the database as it was at noon yesterday. Something like this:

I have been setting up process monitor auto update, and have managed to get it to work - I can see the process status updates in the process monitor screen. Here is what I did.

Oracle support document id 2772617.1 explains how to set this up manually. I wanted this to work as part of the automated build, which means supplying the parameters as part of psft_customisations.yml

A Gotcha!

We have multiple application servers running on the same port (but on different VMs). This means we need different domain IDs for each process scheduler because domain ID and port are used as a key. I would have thought that the hostname should be included to make this a unique identifier, but Oracle have chosen not to do that. Note that domain ID is different from domain name. Oracle documentation suggests using the database name in lower case. The DPK default is APPDOM (which is also the default domain name). If either of these is used, when you set up the inter domain event credentials on the process scheduler and configure the domain (for example by running):

I am not sure what best practice would be as to a location to install and run change assistant. To get the GUI it has to be on Windows. Since we use a VPN we can’t really connect from a laptop as if the VPN drops out we will interrupt the process which can run for several hours. So at present we use a Windows server which has a full PeopleSoft installation to run change assistant.

Django on RHEL9

The reason I am revisiting my Django website is because I am updating the operating system to RHEL9. At the same time I decided to take the opportunity to correct a couple of things I was unhappy with in the previous setup.

I prefer to take a clean VM and build from that. That way we know the exact configuration and can document it.

Set up Linux

We need to install the following (Using YUM)

Some time ago I set up a website using Django which I protected using SAML and Python Social Auth. I drafted this post, as a follow up to my original one but never published it until now.

The way to integrate SAML into Django, indeed to integrate most Single Sign On/Identity provider solutions into most python based websites (Sorry, Service Providers) is to use Python Social Auth.

Installation

We need to ensure the following are installed in the environment