There are times when you need to open the OBIEE Web Catalog tool in offline mode, to amend permissions on user folders, as the “system account” user.
This essentially means running the web cat tool on the BI Server itself.
- Open a putty session to the Linux server hosting the OBIEE BI Services,
- Check to see if there is a vnc server session that’s already running
- ps –ef | grep vnc
- If there are no vncserver sessions, you can start on by typing : vncserver :1 ( where x is the name of the screen you want to start )
- So if I type :vncserver :2, then re-run the ps-ef | grep vnc as I did above, the server should now report 2 screens are available
- You can kill/shutdown sessions via : vncserver –kill :2 ( this will shutdown the 2nd screen ), re-run the “ps –ef | grep vnc” and you will now only see the 1 screen available.
- You can now open the attached vncviewer application, at the host prompt, type the name of the server you want to connect to, and the screen number, in this cases its hlcdb01:1
- You will now be prompted to enter the vnc password.
- Within the terminal window set the environment .e . ./obiee11g.env
- cd $BI_CATALOG_PATH
- cd ../catalogmanager
- ./runcat.sh
- This script will now start the web catalog on the server itself. This allows you to connect as the “system account” which you cannot do from a windows client, and also allows you to open the webcat offline
- Once loaded > File > Open Catalog > click offline > browse to the Web Cat Root
You can now browse the catalog as you would in the windows client, also you can type the username in the dialogue box instead of scrolling and searching. The biggest advantage is the changes you make are as the “system account”
Issues Running runcat.sh
You may find it launches, however when you try to open a catalog the tool crashes with a java crash. A good way to trouble shoot this is run a trace via the following command :-
strace -aef -o ./runcat_trace.txt ./runcat.sh
This will produce the txt file, that may point at missing library files i.e.
access(“/etc/ld.so.preload”, R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Oracle Reference
Unable To Open The OBIEE 11g Catalog Manager On Linux From An X Windows Interface (Doc ID 1413909.1)
OBIEE 11g Catalog Manager Cannot Connect Offline Mode using Runcat.sh (Doc ID 1921067.1)