I am currently on SAP Business Objects 4.2 SP9. I am upgrading to version 4.3 SP4. When I try to enter my password for the existing CMS deployment, I am getting this error. Either the remote CMS cannot be reached or the login credentials are incorrect. I am sure my credentials are fine.
Can someone tell me what the issue is?
Hi Kumaran,
Firstly, don’t do it. There is a serious bug around scheduling in SP4 and SP4 Patch 1 which means that scheduled reports which output as Excel or PDF and either email or save to a network share fail to run each and every time. We found it quite late on and I had to roll back a bunch of environments. If you want a link to the SAP note then let me know.
Secondly, as to your issue, I have seen something similar and what I found used to happen was the Administrator account would somehow become locked when you entered the password. If you get a CMC up in another window then you will see it if you keep an eye on the account and keep refreshing. I got around this by unlocking the account and quickly retrying and it eventually worked.
As I say, I don’t know if it’s the same issue but it sounds like. Let me know if this doesn’t work. Alternatively you might have a SQL Server ODBC connection using Windows Authentication. This is fine for the BO Service Account but will be trying to authenticate as you if you are logged into the server as your own account as you may not have access to the DB. For this you can either log into the server using the service account, get temporary access to the repository DB for your account or, and this is my preference, don’t use Windows authentication and get a SQL Server user set up instead.
Steve
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thanks @ShawshankSteve for info - I was about to lauch the installer… if you know the SAPnote I would appreciate it.
Hey Tom, you’re welcome. The SAP note is 3418696
Looks like it hasn’t been confirmed for a patch yet (I’m not counting BO 2025 of course) but I’m sure lots of companies must be complaining about this one so would expect it soon.
It has caused me a lot of work and I personally think they should have pulled SP4 until it’s fixed! Inexcusable.
Steve
I find this sort of thing pretty serious. I just wrote a blog post on this issue with credit to this thread.
Noel
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Hi Noel,
Great post. I was extremely annoyed at the bug to say the least.
I suspect that I was the one who found that free-hand SQL bug you mentioned too. It morphed from one problem into another. So we have some Oracle-based stored proc FHSQL reports. It turned out that 4.3 introduced a bug so that the first time you opened it and refreshed it, it actually ran the report twice. Not much of a problem you might think but we have a horrible old report which was taking 30 minutes and suddenly started taking an hour. We have an audit table which these procs write to so that confirmed it. SAO eventually said that it was fixed. It was, sort of, but we found that the first run was using the default @prompt parameters and not the supplied parameters from the prompt screen so in our case was coming back as blank on the initial run. This was worse than running twice as no data tells a user that there’s no data so we couldn’t go live with that version either. I was finally ready to roll out SP4 Patch 1 and we discovered that scheduling bug so we’re still actually living with the Oracle running twice bug. All my hair is falling out 
Steve
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SP4 Patch 2 is already one week late,
I hope the bugfix will be in there
… seems to be fixed in SP4 Patch 200
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Yup, noticed that myself this afternoon. We will be testing that area very well. Let’s hope that SAP have actually tested basic functionality this time…
so I have upgraded test system to SP4 patch 200… - no signs of scheduling problem so far…
Thanks for being the canary in coal mine. Best wishes. 
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please keep this updated, at the moment BI 4.3 SP4 Patch 400 is lauched,
is it stable?
thanks in advance.
Hi all,
So we were testing 4.3 SP4 Patch 4 and have decided NOT to proceed with it. Generally it was looking pretty good and fixed a couple of minor issues we have with Patch 2 but there was one issue we considered a show-stopper. Depending on your config this may not affect you or you may not care but I would have thought it would affect most people so read on.
The issue is that when a user tries to go to settings in Launchpad, the settings screen does not appear and you will be staring at the 3 animated dots forever. We have tracked this down to Windows AD authentication and whether the display name of the user has any escaped characters. Our users often display as “Surname, Forename” so the comma is escaped. You can see this from looking at the alias at the bottom of the user properties screen. in the example below you will see that the comma is escaped by a slash (,) between Surname and Forename. This means that the user will have the issue:
secWinAD:CN=Surname, Forename,OU=XXX,OU=Users,OU=XXX,OU=Europe,DC=XXX,DC=NET
If your users don’t have any escaped characters then it works fine. Some of our accounts don’t have this and they have no issues getting to the settings screen.
I believe this is down to an issue which SAP fixed in Patch 3 (we are on 2, we skipped 3 and was testing 4 so that has the change) which looks like they fixed an issue around double quotes but in doing so broke the commas being present. See SAP Note 3406352.
So this may or may not be an issue for you. It was for us as we do use DB credentials where the users maintain their own passwords so they need to get to the screen. We could work around this with Helpdesk and a screenshare from the CMC to get the users to enter their passwords but we think it looks like a step backwards. Some other users also change the option so that each report opens in a new tab so we don’t want to proceed.
I also suspect that this issue should be fixed in Patch 5 (TBC) as I know of another company who have this issue and SAP have developed a hotfix for them (the hotfix is for patch 3 it seems, not sure if it works on 4). We are not even going there and waiting for it to be corrected in a patch. I will confirm here if it is fixed in patch 5 if anyone is interested. I will also post back if we find any other issues in patch 5 once it is released if we do find them.
Would this be useful to anyone?
Steve
Hi,
luckily we don’t have escaped characters in usernames, we are testing SP4.4 and will upgrade Production env very soon. Sometimes seems to me Launchpad in patch 4 is little bit slower than in patch 2. no show-stopper found so far… but certainly we will found at least 2 after the upgrade 
fyi - just upgraded prod env to SP4 patch 400 … I expect a horrible week 
Hoping for the best for you.
so far so good 
- mostly the users complain about the new prompt dialog. specially those with variable instead of prompt 
I should say it was a in-place upgrade of 2 nodes BO 4.2 SP9.6 to 4.4 SP3.4 on Win2019 (yes I am aware of that KB with supported upgrade paths…)
there were some errors on CMC-Servers - some “servers” were not starting - but when the problem services were split to standalone/new “servers” - they run fine.
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