Cognos Analytics 11.0.3.0 Distribuited Install

[Romeo]

Hello everyone,

Once again I have a new head ache..

I am trying to perform a distribuited intall of Cognos 11.

I want to have the folowing architecture:

Server 1: Main Content Manager and Disptacher
Server 2: Secondary Content Manager and another dispatcher
Server 3: GW components (I want to be able to use SSO with Kerberos)

I have 3 VM servers as it follows:
- Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
- Quad core 2.5 GHz, Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3
- 16GB RAM
- NTFS partitions for C,D,E drives

First I tried to intall Cognos 11.0.0.0.
I initiated setup as Admin for App server 1, I selected Content manager and application tier components and everything finished fine. I configured Cognos to my needs and Cognos portal works fine and is accessible locally. Afterwards I proceeded installing GW components in the GW server. The installation seemed to have gone well. I also configured IIS as I usually do with Cognos 10 and then tested to access Cognso 11 portal from the GW server. I get "The page cannot be displayed" error message.
So, if I access the Cognos 11 from the server where CM and dispathcer is installed, access is successful. If I try to access Cognos 11 from outside the CM server, I am not able to access.

Then I tried 11.0.3.0 installation. The steps are slightly different.
Everything went ok for Application Server 1.
When installing GW components on the GW server, I selected only GW components to be installed. After introducing details for connecting to running CM, the installation wizzard tries to validate the data introduced. At this point I get the error message you can see in the attachment.

Any ideas over the reason why the two installations are not being able to communicate with each other?
If I ping the servers between each other, they see each other (packages are delivered successfuly)

As always, Thank you very much for taking the time in reading this entry. ::) ;D ;D
Hope you can help me.

Kind regards,
Romeo.

[cadams]

email me, and I'll walk you though it.. but throw away and burn any 11.0.0 software you have ! possibly even wait until next week when 11.0.4 is out..

[Romeo]

Hey,

As an update to this topic I have discovered that the Win2K12 servers are not accessible from outside.
I mean if I want access the Cognos 11 portal from my local PC or from another remote server, access is not possible.
So I tried testing with "telnet hostname port" and "telnet hostIP port" and telnet is not able to connect. I tried ports 9989,9300 and 80. All attempts fail to connect.

I am in contact with the Hosting team to check if there is a firewall blocking the HTTP requests or something similar.

Thank you very much @cadams. I will wait to see if the Hosting team can see something fishy on the servers.
I don't want you to waste time on something that we might be doing right but then the provided servers are not configured as they should...

Anyway I have a document where I documented all the steps I took for 11.0.3.0. It is attached to this post.

Thank you very much!
Cheers!


Cheers!

[Romeo]

Hello,

I have a little update regarding this topic though the issue is not fully solved...
My problem for not being able to access Cognos portal from outside the localhost was due to firewall blocking.
A firewall rule had to be added in order to allow HTML communication between servers.
Now I am struggling to configure IIS in order to use SSO.
I followed IBM's instructions for configuring IIS(Method 1) but this did not work as expected.

IBM Tecnote: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21976435&aid=1

I would like to achieve a behaviour similar to Cognos 10 where I could use ISAPI for logging in with SSO.
With Cognos 10 we had http://alias.domain.com/alias/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll

It seems like IIS is still adding "/bi" to my Cognos Alias and there is no way to make "/bi" dissapear. Now I get something like http://alias.domain.com/alias/bi and obviously this cannot be resolved by IIS.

Did anyone managed to configure IIS for using SSO?

Thanks!

[ZenCog]

Now I am struggling to configure IIS in order to use SSO. I followed IBM's instructions for configuring IIS(Method 1) but this did not work as expected. IBM Tecnote: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21976435&aid=1
It seems like IIS is still adding "/bi" to my Cognos Alias and there is no way to make "/bi" dissapear. Now I get something like http://alias.domain.com/alias/bi and obviously this cannot be resolved by IIS

You are following obsolete instructions for 11.0.4 version. Here is the up to date webpage. http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEP7J_11.0.0/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.inst_cr_winux.doc/t_sso_actdirserver.html

Also, please read through http://www.cognoise.com/index.php/topic,31530.0.html thread in this forum. There is two page discussion about this issue. There used to be wrong/incomplete/obsolete instructions in IBM architecture docs and web pages. While this thread was growing, IBM kept updating the web page listed above. Now those instructions look pretty complete.

Also, if you use http://mybox/alias/bi URL then make sure to add trailing slash because /alias/bi may not work but /alias/bi/ should work. Also, simply accessing /alias/ URL works with IIS/SSO configuration.

[Romeo]

Thanks a lot for the info @ZenCog!!

I will have a look right away.

Cheers!