I just went through the pain of installing Broadcast Agent Publisher 6.1a on Windows 2000 SP3 server and would like to share the problems I encountered along the way and how they were resolved. Hopefully, this posting can save somebody time and/or a call to BO Tech Support. Corrections and additions are certainly welcome.
Before you touch Publisher, install and configure Webi server with InfoView/Webintelligence and Broadcast Agent. Make sure InfoView web site is operational and that you can refresh documents. Configure a Broadcast Agent and try scheduling a document on it to make sure it works.
BusinessObjects node/ORB and InfoView need to be configured before Publisher is installed. If the cluster is reconfigured, Publisher needs to be reinstalled. This particular piece of information was received from BO Technical Support.
Publisher 6.1a only works with ASP. Supposedly, full JSP support is coming in 6.5
For simplicity, I assume that BusinessObjects is installed to D:\BusObj and that Webi service account is called domainname\busobjserv
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Log on to the server as the service account that Webi is using (domainname\busobjserv)
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Install the prerequisites from the Publisher CD: windows_scripting_v51.exe and msxml3.exe
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Stop Webi
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Copy the Publisher XML license file to a folder on the server
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Run setup.exe
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Reboot
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After the install you should have two new services in your Services panel. One is called ‘BCA Publisher Web Application’ and the other one is called ‘BCA Publisher Web Support’. You might be missing one of them (happened to me more than once). If you are missing ‘BCA Publisher Web Application’, run ‘BCAPublisherService.exe /Service’. If you are missing ‘BCA Publisher Web Support’, run ‘BCAPSupportMgr.exe -i’. Both programs are located in D:\BusObj\broadcast agent publisher\Shared\bin (remember I assume that BusinessObjects server and Publisher are installed in D:\BusObj). I got that piece of information from Technical Support only to later find out that it was also in the readme file.
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Configure the Publisher services. You need to set the ‘BCA Publisher Web Application’ and ‘BCA Publisher Web Support’ services to start automatically and to log in as the service account (domainname\busobjserv). Also, you need to set the recovery to ‘Restart the Service’ on the first, second and third failures. This is for the server start-up. The ‘BCA Publisher Web Application’ service will not start (or to be exact, it will start and stop) until Webi is fully started. The Webi service takes a while to start up. Because the publisher service does not know it needs to wait until Webi is fully started, it starts, sees that Webi is not there and stops. Setting the recovery to ‘Restart the Service’ works around this issue. This tip is from BO Technical Support.
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Run Repository Manager. I believe you need to do that even if your repository already has Publisher tables, which will be the case if Publisher was installed previously on this or some other box. This will create the bomain.mkey file, which I believe Publisher is using instead of the bomain.key file. This is kind of like Safe Recovery in Supervisor.
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If this is the first time you install Publisher, you’ll need to create the ‘Broadcast Agent Publisher’ group in the repository, export the Publisher universe and document. These steps supposedly can be done automatically with Repository Manager, but I could never make it work. I always get an Active X error if I try to use Repository Manager to automatically export the universe and the document. Besides to create the group, you’d need to have Supervisor installed on the server. And to export the universe, you’ll need Designer set up on the server. I normally do not install these on servers. To me, it is much easier to do create the group and export the universe and the document manually. Refer to the ‘Broadcast Agent Publisher Installation and Configuration Guide’ for exact steps (there is probably a reason why the manual steps are thoroughly documented in the manual )
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Turn off Windows Integrated Authentication (leave only Anonymous access) on BCAPublisher, BCAPublisherWILink, wiBCAPublisher, wiBCAEndUser and BCAExtUser virtual folders in IIS Administrator. My experience has been that you only need to adjust the first two (BCAPublisher and BCAPublisherWILink), the latter three are set correctly. I believe this step contradicts the install guide, but it is from BO Tech Support
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Copy servlet.jar to D:\BusObj\classes (see resolution 15012). Resolution 15012 says to take the file from a Tomcat installation ($TOMCAT_ROOT\common\lib for Tomcat 4.0.6), I however extracted mine from the _or29446.cab file from the BusinessObjects 6.1a (not Publisher) installation CD. There is only one file with a long a weird name inside this CAB file. You need to extract it, for example with WinZip, and rename to servlet.jar (Note: this is true for BusinessObjects 6.1a, other versions might store servlet.jar in a different CAB file. You can always use Orca (a tool from Microsoft, for details and to obtain please see MS Knowledge Base article 255905) to open the BusinessObjects.msi file and search for servlet.jar). If you miss this step, you’ll see the “Cannot find the required information in the database reply. (Error: BAW 0018)”
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Run Parameter Administrator. In [Global Parameters] make sure that ‘PubDocDomain’ points to an existing document domain. Add a host. Use the server name as the host name. Notice that by default directories specified in [PublishedOutputDirectory] and [TempReportOutputDirectory] point to non-existing folders. Make sure you create them or change the values to existing locations.
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If you get a ‘BAW 0011: Internal Error’, review resolution 14103. It is for an older version (5.6) and did not resolve my problem, but maybe it will help you. I was able to resolve my BAW 0011 by reinstalling everything, including the OS, from scratch.
Sergei
Sergei Ryabkov (BOB member since 2003-03-11)