Upgrade /Update Issues

Upgrading PeopleTools and Peoplesoft Campus Application from 8.53 & 9.0 to 8.55 & 9.2

This page will have most of the issues that I have faced while doing the upgrade from 9.0 to 9.2 campus application. I will also be doing a portal tools upgrade soon.

So, to give you a short preface, the way i'm doing the upgrade is by installing PUM and getting a new demo from Oracle using its image files. Guess we can throw away our old demos!

Here's the first step in planning the upgrade:

Install virtual box in a Physical machine. Important to note that, this won't work in an already virtual machine. So, once you have a minimum required machine configuration, head over to this URL: Virtual Box Download page to install the latest version of VB. At the time of my install, VB was at VirtualBox-5.1.14.

Make sure you have the Virtualization Technology enabled in the BIOS setup of your OS.

2. Head over to Oracle Support, find this document for all the resources that we might need for the upgrade.

PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) Home Page (Doc ID 1641843.2)

3. Watch the training videos (in the training and resources tab on the left hand side of the PUM home page). The first training video was on HCM, so I thought that the campus solutions could be something similar. Although the commentator did mention that the ova gen file will usually be in the first zip file of update image collection, I could not find it in the first zip file. Which takes us to Issue #1.

4. Download Update Image for Campus solutions. from the tab as shown in this image:

Issue #1:

Virtual Box's PS .ova gen file missing from the first zip file from the update image files collection.

Solution #1:

Unzip the first zip file. CS-920-UPD-004-OVA_1of15.zip
Navigate to setup folder
Find the psft-dpk-setup.ps1 file, and run it in a powershell
- If you aren't aware, click start -> type Powershell -> Run as admin to open a powershell window
- Navigate to the folder where you have downloaded all of the zip files (from oracle's update image download page)

Issue #2:

PowerShell says “execution of scripts is disabled on this system.”

Issue #3:

Platform Windows is not Supported in this Release, while running a powershell

Solution #2 & Solution #3:

Here's what I did to fix this issue.

Unzip the first zip file.
Copy (I did the cut operation i.e CTRL +X) the "setup" folder and paste it along with the other zip folders. I did this because there was another issue that came up while running the powershell... (issue #3). (Here's why I did that: E-INSTALL: Error while installing Peopletools 8.55.01 DPK on Windows 2012 R2: "Platform Is not Supported in this Release" (Doc ID 2098779.1)
Run the .\psft-dpk-setup.ps1 file (See below image)

Issue #4:

Auto Import of Peoplesoft Image File to Virtual Box failed with

Extraction of SES VMDK File Failed. If the PeopleSoft environment setup for Demo purpose, SES VMDK is needed. Please download SES VMDK TGZ files again from My Oracle Support and rerun the setup script.

So, I tried doing it manually and I got this error again...

Failed to import appliance C:\Users\sfaqu\Downloads\Oracle\VBOX_8_55_12_SHELL.ova.

Machine settings file 'C:\Users\sfaqu\VirtualBox VMs\VBOX_8_55_12_SHELL\VBOX_8_55_12_SHELL.vbox' already exists.

Result Code:

VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)

Component:

MachineWrap

Interface:

IMachine {b2547866-a0a1-4391-8b86-6952d82efaa0}

Solution:

I tried the install again, manually by importing the .OVA file by the standard procedure, as shown in the training video. There was already one semi-imported listed, but i removed it (only from the VB, but not from the HDD. I thought It'd also remove the .OVA file that was combined using powershell.

Anyway, after removing the already imported virtual machine folder from the machines' default folder, the process of importing was successful.

Issue:

The Initialization of PeopleSoft Environment failed. Check the log /var/log/psft_setup.log.20170227

Solution:

If the error was on step where the domain was initializing, then the issue was with the hostname. Oracle found a bug where the hostname with uppercase letters is throwing errors. So, the temporary workaround is to use lowercase letters. (Doc ID: 2104607.1)

To access psadmin in PUM, after installing and configuring the Peoplesoft Update Image:

login to root
su psadm2
cd /opt/oracle/psft/pt/ps_home8.55.12/appserv
psadmin

Change psadm2 password

exit out of root
login to psadm2 using default password 0radmin
If you are having issues changin password do this
login as root and edit using vi the following file /etc/pam.d/system-auth
Comment the following three lines
- # password requisite pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3
- # password sufficient pam_unix.so md5 shadow nullok try_first_pass use_authtok
- # password required pam_deny.so
Add the following line
- password sufficient /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so nullok md5 shadow
Keep this session open and login using another session(putty) and change the psadm2 password, this is to make sure you don't lock yourself out