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

The Problem

We have an application that uses a lot of memory when a user takes particular actions. I feel the application should take steps to protect itself - it shouldn’t allow an action from a user which will cause issues. I wasn’t able to influence the application so we lived with occasional out of memory issues, and times where processes could not be forked due to lack of memory.

Back to my series about applying patches to PeopleTools 8.59. I am now visiting the Windows process scheduler. Like the Unix servers, Oracle installs all the software, so it all needs to be patched. But there are always additional complications with Windows.

Java Issues

Java Patch Download

If the same procedure as Unix is followed to download Java, we end up with an executable installer. The only silent install option is /s - there is no way to specify the folder it ends up in. Also this does a Windows install updating the registry etc. It’s likely not to want to have two copies of the same Java in different locations.

Now we have the core PeopleSoft stack communicating encrypting traffic, we need to address the add-ons. Elastic search is becoming more important, and it is difficult to use PeopleSoft without it. Here is how to add encryption to Elastic Search and Kibana.

There is two way communication between Elastic search and PeopleSoft, Both of these directions need to be configured. Fortunately we have already done some of this work.

This procedure is documented in PeopleBooks under Products -> Development Tools -> Search Technology -> Working with PeopleSoft Search Framework Security Features. Here are links for Elasticsearch and Kibana

Here is an interesting problem we had recently. A field which should be length 1 was being reported in some cases to be length 4. How is this possible?

The Problem

I use dbms_sql.describe_columns to discover the size of the field in a remote database. I use this value to recreate a copy of the view in the remote database as a table locally. This is used for testing. We can mimic this in the local database as follows:

Further to my last article about applying critical patches to the web server, lets take a look at the application and database servers.

Which Servers?

In my mind WebLogic runs on the web tier, and Tuxedo runs on the Application and process scheduler tier. The Oracle Client is also on the Application and process scheduler tier. However, since these and Java are installed on all tiers, we should apply the patches on all tiers.