Cognos 8.4.1 configuration issue (Error while starting the Cognos services)

Cognos 10 Business Intelligence Installation and Configuration
1

IBM Cognos version: 8.4.1
Linux server version:

  • PE R5102* Intel Xeon E5520 (2.25 GHz, 8 MB Cache, ) 16X DVD R/W, 4 GB RAM 1066MHz, PERC 6/I RAID ControllerCard 256 MB PCIe, 2x4 Connectors

Problem description:

  • Installing base server done with no issue at all
  • Opening cognos configuration with no issues
  • When trying to save configuration before the TEST action the following error appears:
    **The cryptography information cannot be encrypted, do you want to create it on a plain text (yes/no)
  • After replying with yes, and then trying to save the configuration, it says that it can’t generate The cryptography information and it stops the saving process
  • Accordingly, the content database start process fail and so as the Cognos server start fail

we need to perform this installation urgently, so kindly, has anyone faced such issue before to advice?

Note: we have tried regenerating The cryptography information by:

  • backing up and deleting the folders signkeypair, encryptkeypair and CSK
  • Remove the JCE files physically
  • Start and save Cognos Configuration once again to rebuild the encryption keys
    …However; this solution didn’t work too

Thank you in advance,
Soha

2

The big difference with Cognos installation on Windows and Unix/Linux is: The JRE is not installed with the Cognos product.

The IBM Cognos security provider files must be located in the JVM environment.

IBM Cognos 8 cryptographic services use a .jar (Java Archive) file, named bcprov-jdknn-nnn.jar, that must be located in your Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This file provides additional encryption and decryption routines that are not supplied as part of a default JVM installation. To ensure security, the encryption file must be loaded by the JVM using the java extensions directory.

You must have set the JAVA_HOME environment variable.
Steps

  1. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the JRE location.
    For example, to set JAVA_HOME to the JRE files provided with the installation, the path is c8_location/bin/jre/version.
  2. Copy the bcprov-jdknn-nnn.jar file from the c8_location/bin/jre/version/lib/ext directory to the Java_location/lib/ext directory.
  3. Start IBM Cognos Configuration.
  4. Save the configuration.
  IBM Cognos Configuration can now generate new keys and encrypts the data.
3

This topic needs to be moved to the 8.4.1 forum.

Just saying. :slight_smile: