Production server crashed c7.x

[sreshty]

Hello Experts,

I have a weird situation at my client place and need your guidance regarding the recovery/ restore.

It has been a while that I have worked on Cognos 7 and in the recent past I moved on to c8 and c10. I worked as a developer in c7 version
and know nothing about administration of c7 version.

My client is dependent upon the Power Play cubes and reports related to c7. Could you please help me understand and give me advice as to where I should jump start to recover the environment.

Facts:-
Crashed Server: Windows NT
New Server: Windows 2003
No support with IBM.
No Back up/ Disaster recovery server.
Fired the entire BI team who handled the project by far and hired me (Cognos Admin) to support their current situation.
They have a image restored from the crashed server.
Have multiple gateways in crn and c8.
Have multiple namespace defined for security using Cognos series 7 (Access Manager), LDAP and Active Directory.
Oracle database for everything.

Requirement:-
1) Client says they have backup files related to c7 such as .iwr and .mdc and not sure about else they want me to have for restoring.
2) They want me to perform a fresh installation of cognos 7 and use the back up files to restore in the new Windows 2003 server.

Questions:
1) Where should I start from?
2) I know it is dumb to ask this but anyone has experienced such an issue and how long it would take to restore the entire enviornment and help start the environment running.
3) What all backup files I need to perform the restoration?
4) Will there be a version incompatability issue if I use a different Cognos 7 installation other than the one that has been used in the crashed server?

I shall appreciate any additional advice that you might have for me.

What a way to start working for Christmas!

Happy Christmas to all the readers!

[MFGF]

Oh dear! It sounds like you have been put in a very tricky position!

One of the major differences between Cognos 7 and ReportNet/Cognos 8/Cognos 10 is that Cognos 7 is a collection of technologies - client and web - which integrate, rather than being a single architecture like the one you are used to in C8 etc.

It sounds like you have
1. PowerPlay Enterprise Server
2. Impromptu Web Reports
3. Upfront (portal)
on your server, secured by an Access Manager namespace.  It's also possible you have PowerPlay client and Impromptu client instances on client PCs which integrate with the server?

Your first step should be to get the relevant Cognos products re-installed on your new server. I assume you will need to install newer versions than you were running previously - versions which are supported under Windows Server 2003? I guess you have no choice but to go with those, and hope that you can get your old content upgraded.

If your LDAP namespace was hosted on the old server, you will also need to install the Sun One Directory Server and configure a new data directory server, probably running on port 389, which you can then use to host your Access Manager namespace.

Once the Cognos products are installed, there is a configuration utility called Configuration Manager which you will need to run - it is the equivalent of today's Cognos Configuration in C8/C10. There are options in there to configure your Access Manager namespace as well as the installed Cognos products.

Once you have done this (and created the relevant virtual directories in your web server) you should then have a working, albeit empty, C7 instance, and your next challenge will be to figure out how/where the old content was backed up.  If you are (really really) lucky, you will have an export of the entire instance created in Deployment Manager, and you can simply fire up Deployment Manager in your new C7 instance and start the import process. This would be your ideal scenario.  If you don't have a deployment, things will be more tricky.

On your C7 server, content for different products is held in different ways and in different places. For example, IWR stores the catalog and reports in a folder on disk, keeps pointers to each of these in an Objectstore database, and these are in turn pointed to from your Upfront data store, which is a Velocis database I think. PowerPlay reports and cubes are held in folders, and with these there is no objectstore database - the pointers are held in cfx files in a PPSRoot folder, but again these are usually addressed via pointers with in the Upfront data store.  If you have backups of your IWR report folders, your PowerPlay report folders, your IWR datastore, your PPSRoot folder and your Upfront data store, you could copy in the folders and restore the databases (Objectstore and Velocis come with their own proprietary backup/restore utilities) and see if that gives you working content.  The alternative would be to use the IWR publishing utility from the C7 Admin Console to republish all your catalogs and reports to IWR, and the PPAdmin tool to publish all your PowerPlay cubes and reports to the server. You would also need to restore your Access Manager namespace, which may have been saved as an LAE file or as a LDIF file from Sun One.

I would guess it would take a few weeks to get everything back in and working (if you have it all) and tested and running. It is not a particularly easy task when you know what you are doing, but to be thrown in blind as you are being, and expected to just magically "make it work" is a huge challenge.

Good luck!!

MF.

[sreshty]

Hi MF,

I am glad that you have responded to my issue. Honestly everyone is busy in here with the blame game and not trying to resolve the issue. In this confusion a reply from you gives me a ray of hope and a path to start with. I shall follow the intricacies sighted by you and shall update the same how did it go.

Thanks a million!

Sreshty