Installing Change Assistant

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.

To install Change Assistant I use Ansible to create a task to run the installer. This assumes that PeopleTools has already been installed. The task runs a command prompt with the following parameters (Wrapped for readability)

/c C:\psoft\pt\ps_home8.60.99\setup\PsCA\silentInstall.bat
"C:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant"
UPGRADE
BACKUP

I experimented with different options, and this works, so I stuck with it.

We have tried to get Change Assistant to work if we log in with an unprivileged account. The idea is that the install is done as an administrator, as Oracle requires this, but we can run the upgrade as a normal user.

There is an outstanding enhancement request, but it has not got much traction. However, the the psadmin.io people have discovered that if you allow change assistant to write to it’s installation folder, it works OK.

This is the ansible command I use to achieve that:

- name: Allow users to update Change Assistant folder
  ansible.windows.win_acl:
    path: "C:\\Program Files\\PeopleSoft\\Change Assistant"
    user: "Authenticated Users"
    rights: FullControl
    state: present
    type: allow

Next, I set some default options. It seems to create a database I need to give change assistant my login details, which I don’t really want to do. Colleagues will be using this desktop as well as myself. This is something Change Assistant doesn’t seem to cater for. So as a start I will just create the basic defaults. First I create a response file. Since we have had issues with long filenames in the past, we try to keep the paths as short as possible. Also I am not particularly creative with naming directories!

[GENERAL]
MODE=UM
ACTION=OPTIONS
OUT=c:\Output\options.log
EXONERR=Y

[OPTIONS]
REPLACE=Y
SWP=False
PSH=C:\psoft\pt\ps_home8.60.99
PAH=C:\psoft\APPS
PCH=C:\psoft\CUST
STG=C:\Staging
OD=C:\Output
DL=C:\Download
SQH=C:\psoft\pt\oracle-client\19.3.0.0\bin\sqlplus.exe
EMYN=N
SRCYN=N

The Oracle documentation: PeopleTools 8.60: Change Assistant and Update Manager is a little confusing here. I raised an SR to hopefully get it corrected. This is the explanation of the options I am setting:

Option	Setting	Notes
Mode	UM	Update Manager
ACTION	OPTIONS	Set the default options for Update Manager
OUT	file	Write a log file.
EXONERROR	Y	Exit on error. If set to N, the change assistant window will stay open. This is useful for testing, but since I am running this from ansible, I won’t have access to the window, so won’t be able to access the window. So it should be closed.
REPLACE	Y	Replace any currently existing configuration
SWP	False	Don’t Show the Welcome Page (Why is this “False” and not “N” like everything else?!)
PSH	folder	PSHOME directory. This was incorrect in the documentation.
PAH	folder	PS APP Home directory. Also incorrect in the documentation. I suspect this can’t be set with this command, as it isn’t a general option.
PCH	folder	PS CUST Home directory. Again this isn’t a general option, so it probably can’t be set here.
STG	folder	Staging directory for patches.
OD	folder	Output directory
SQH	file	Path to sqplplus, which is the SQL Query tool for Oracle.
EMYN	N	Don’t configure EM Hub - We don’t use it for tools patches
SRCYN	N	Don’t configure the PUM source home. Again this isn’t needed for tools patches.

Then I apply them as follows (From a command prompt:

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cd "C:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant"
changeassistant.bat -INI C:\ca_options.ini

Where ca_options.ini is the response file created above.

We will have to have a think about accounts for change assistant. Currently we run the process manually, so we use our own accounts. If we are moving to an automated process, maybe we should create a service account for automated application of tools updates?