I want to make a simple change to my CMC login page. I want to prevent users from changing the APS “System” name. I have a Web server dedicated for each of my BOXI R2 environments and I want to be assured if I go to a specific URL that I always log into a specific coresponding APS. Currently, if I go to either my Test or Prod url, the cookie on my pc populates my last visited APS field. What this means is, if I go to my Web server for my Test system, and the last BO system I logged into was production, the production APS will be populated by default. I don’t want this. Its too dangerous that a user may log into the wrong system and do some harm.
So, I am trying to find out what web file controls the login screen for the CMC. And how can I modify it? I’ve opened a tech support incident with Business Objects asking how to do this, and all they give me is their standard “We don’t help users customize their environments. If you like you can purchase support from our consultants”. This is a very small change and I can’t see highering a consultant to make a single simple (or so I thought it should be) change.
Now, keep in mind i’m asking about the CMC (Central Management Console), not Infoview. I already know how to modify login page for InfoView. But, it seems harder to figure out where the files that make up the CMC interface come from.
All I want to do is prevent the “System” line from grabbing the cookie APS value, instead, I want to hard code a system name that can’t be changed by the user. Does anyone know how to customize this page?
Thanks for any suggestions!
PS- Yes, I already did a search in the forum for this topic but wasn’t able to find anything close to my question. I even got to a point of just searching for any message with CMC in the body, but that didn’t work because during my browsing of all articles with CMC in the body I got a message from the Forum server saying that my search appeared similar to a virus or adware and wouldn’t let me continue browsing all articles with “CMC” UGH
OK. I’ll admit its only for me and 2 others that administer our servers. But, we use CMC constantly for administrative purposes, and occasionally I am taken by surprise as to which APS server I’m on because, I pick the Web server on the Test envrionment but often unexpectedly the APS I connect to is production because that was the last APS i connected to.
I haven’t been able to find anyone thus far who knows how to modify the CMC at all. Modifying the InfoView interface is quite simple and I’ve seen lots of examples for modifying that interface, but the CMC seems to be different. Do you know what file contains the instruction that causes CMC to grab the cookie that I can change to instead just hard code the value of the APS Server I want?
Dev, Test, and Prod are three separate environments and should be installed independently on different servers. Therefore, your URLs to their respective CMC should be different. You cannot change the environment on the logon page.
In my case, I have found that setting up favorites on my browser to different environments are more than sufficient.
By the way, don’t tell me you are installing your test environment on the same servers as your production environment.
That is my problem exactly. I do have completely separate dev/test/prod envrionments, with separate web servers. The problem occurs, for example, when I go to the Test web server and the Prod System APS is auto-populated in the system field. If in a hurry, I may accidentally log into the wrong system.
Just want to try to find a way to prevent the login page from grabbing the last logged in APS value from a local cookie.
When you use the dev URL to access the dev environment, using the halo web server, the system should be configured to display automatically @dev or something like that on the login screen. Then, when you use the test URL to access the test environment, using the burnoutrevenge web server, the system is configured to display automatically @test. You cannot type in @dev to access the dev environment thru the burnoutrevenge web server because it simply cannot understand what @dev is. As long as your environments are separate, there is no chance of typing in the wrong environment…not unless you are commingling the web servers.
My URLs do look just like that for my separate environment web servers. However, the SYSTEM field is populated with whatever APS I last logged into regardless of the URL. I tried this with both the actual aps machine name as the system and the cluster name.
Perhaps this has something to do with our virtual IP. We have a VIP in front of both environments. Prod has two servers and Test has two servers. Only one server is active in each environment at a time (1 active/ 1 backup in each environment). We use a failover software that will point the VIP to whichever server is active for each environment.
If I log in and out of the TEST environment CMC url and then go to the PROD url the TEST system is listed in the box. (and vice versa) It appears to me this login screen just blindly grabs a cookie or perhaps its a registry setting to get the system name regardless of the URL being accessed. (This happens in both IE7 and Firefox 2 using both tabbed browsing, or completely separate browsers).
This has to do with the ‘persistent cookie’ setting in infoview. See page 208 of the “BusinessObjects Enterprise™ XI Release 2 Deployment and Configuration Guide” which is titled “Disabling persistent cookies for InfoView”.
Thanks for the tip Orange. However, this fix appears to be only for InfoView.
The file is located in C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\webapps\businessobjects\enterprise115\desktoplaunch\WEB-INF
I do not see the equivilant persistent cookies parameter in the web.xml file for CMC. The CMC web.xml file located in:
C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\webapps\businessobjects\enterprise115\adminlaunch\WEB-INF
I would love to find the javascript page that contains the design of the CMC login page so I can customize it. I have searched and searched the server and can’t find it. Beginning to think this is just something else I’ll have to live with.
Just for kicks I tried changing the value from true to false for InfoView and restarted my Tomcat server, however aps system name still stayed populated everytime i restarted my browser regardless of how many times i cleared the cookies. Looks like this feature may not work for XIR2 Java Infoview.
You are correct - I would have expected that same setting to be there for the CMC as well. I dont have a java system running at the moment so cant doublecheck but am sure you are right.
At the same time, you could argue that the problem would be there for Infoview but would be controllable for the CMC as there would be a significant smaller number of people that would need access to that application.
On a side note - the CMC is written in C++ and is therefore not really possible to personalise, for obvious reasons I would say: if you would manage to disable the logon to your CMC you are basically screwed. But I understand that doesnt really help your situation…
Right what I stumbled into today, on BO XI 3.5 :
3 servers (dev, acc, prod), 3 web-adresses for their CMC
But each of them HAS a “system” field on the login page.
And that got populated “wrong”:
on the “url for production CMC” it logged me in to dev. OF COURSE there was a big difference between the universe I saw in the CMC (version x.x.D) on that production system, and worse: “updated yesterday”, and the unverse that was retrieved “from prod” through Designer: version x.x.A , two versions earlier, and “dated” in April.
The interface shows “prod” system in the navigation bar, an as CMC “is for admins only and doesn’t need personalisation” it hides on which ACTUAL system I was viewing.
Had to log-off / log-on three times before I noticed the “wrong server” .
So yes, it would be very helpful to be able to distinguish between these machines somehow. (Running banner, background colour tweak … ? )
But we didn’t find how to do that.
In BI4 we will have multiple web servers, multiple processing servers … for some environments. So the “problem” won’t go away in that upgrade.
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