Operating System TP / TMS / CTS unconditional modes
The TMS / CTS functions are a front end to the TP commands at the operating system level. If you use the operating system commands, you face the challenge of replicating the options available via the SAP GUI front end. These options are controlled by using the Unconditional mode. An example of how to use these is shown below.
host:prdadm 2> tp import L6BK162625 PA1 U client=100
This is tp version 340.16.38 (release 640)
This is R3trans version 6.13 (release 640 - 07.01.08 - 14:25:00).
2EETW000 T5QTM table class is ‘C’. Entries are only imported to client ‘000′.
2EETW000 T5QTX table class is ‘C’. Entries are only imported to client ‘000′.
R3trans finished (0008).
tp finished with return code: 8
meaning:
A tool used by tp produced errors
host:prdadm 3> tp addtobuffer L6BK162625 PA1
This is tp version 340.16.38 (release 640)
Addtobuffer successful for L6BK162625
tp finished with return code: 0
meaning:
Everything OK
host:prdadm 4> tp import L6BK162625 PA1 U128 client=100
This is tp version 340.16.38 (release 640)
This is R3trans version 6.13 (release 640 - 07.01.08 - 14:25:00).
R3trans finished (0000).
tp finished with return code: 0
meaning:
Everything OK
host:prdadm 5>
The U stands for unconditional force, similar to the options that you can select when importing via the SAP GUI.
0: Overtaker - change requests can be imported without deleting it from the buffer. Usually, this is followed sooner or later by an import using unconditional mode 1 to import another transport in the correct sequence.
1: Import the transport again.
2: Allow transport to overwrite SAP or System originals.
3: Allow transport to overwrite system-dependant objects.
5: Allow transport to contain source systems other than the integration system (usually used only when importing into Development or Consolidation system).
6: Allow transport to overwrite objects in unconfirmed repairs.
8: Allow transport to ignore limitations caused by the table classification (see the example above).
9: Allow transport to ignore that the system is locked for this kind of transport.
Remember that the location to run the tp addtobuffer and / or tp import from is operating system dependent:
(Windows): \\$(SAPTRANSHOST)\sapmnt\trans\bin
(UNIX): /usr/sap/trans/bin
Generate SAP Installation Key
For any SAP install except the Trial Editions available from SDN (and Solution Manager itself), you need to obtain a Installation/Upgrade Key (sometimes known as the ‘magic number’) from a Solution Manager system. Usually, you should get this from the Solution Manager system that will be used for managing changes, software diagnostics etc for you installation. However, note that you do not have to use any particular Solution Manager system, to get the the installation up and running.
Procedure
On the SAP Solution Manager System :
1. Call the System Landscape Maintenance (transaction SMSY) in your Solution Manager system.
2. Create your SAP System in the system landschape:
a. Select the landscape component Systems, and choose Create New System, in the context menu.
b. Enter the system ID as the system, in the following dialog box.
c. Choose the product (i.e. SAP ECC), and the product version (i.e. SAP ECC 5.0 or higher), from the possible entries help, and Save.
d. Complete the system data, as far as possible.
e. Save your entries.
3. Generate the key:
a. Choose System Landscape ® Other Object….
b. Set the System flag, and choose the system which is to be installed or upgraded, from the possible entries help. If you have created a system in the SAP Solution Manager, in the previous step, choose it.
c. Choose Generate Installation/Upgrade Key.
d. Enter the required data and choose Generate Key.
The system displays the key.
Installation/upgrade tool
Specify this key in the installation or upgrade tool when requested. This is (usually) the last step of the ‘Check Parameters phase’, immediately prior to the start of the ‘Execute Service’ phase.
Mastering SAP Technology 2008 Conference
I’ve just got home from this years Mastering SAP Technologies conference. Over 50 presentations and 4 workshops in the three formal days, plus a useful SAP Community Day / ‘unconference’ on the Sunday immediately prior to the conference. As usual at these things, the informal networking was as much fun as the rest of the conference (thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the drinks on Sunday night). One of the highlights was meeting and talking to Thomas Jung and Peter McNulty from SAP Labs in Paolo Alto, USA. There was a lot to learn, and I was impressed by how willing people in general (not just the presenters, SAP staff or vendor staff) were to share their experiences.
Mike Nicholls (talking) and myself (in one of THOSE shirts) facilitated one of the SDN BOF sessions – this one was tentatively titled “Portals implementation technical how to”.
Most of the people who sat in on this did not have an SAP portal at all, and were only considering it because they wanted to implement ESS / MSS.
This lead to some people discussing how it was theoretically possible to run ESS or MSS (or write your own equivalent) without the SAP portal. However, Mike did a good job of explaining exactly how impractical it was.
It was here that I was struck by how underutilised the SAP portal was in most sites (in Australia at least), with little or no use of Collaboration, Knowledge Management etc.
The conference itself was kicked off on Monday morning by a brief keynote from Ishmael Ghalinin (of Intalio of BPMS fame) about living online, a technique called office 2.0. He manages his life through such online tools as Google Docs and Salesforce.com, and in fact, the computer he was presenting with was one that he’d borrowed for the morning. The obvious flaw turned up when he announced that he was leaving immediately to catch a fligh tfrom Brisbane to the US – the direct Qantas flight giving him approximately 13 hours of no connectivity.
Process Integration and Enterprise SOA
Track A (of 5 tracks) was devoted to XI / PI and SOA presentations. One of the more interesting presentations on day 1 came from this track, from Benjamin Salter of Valero. He spoke of taming the Enterprise SOA tangle. The key points, as Mr Salter summarised them were:
Enterprise SOA is a way of thinking -A design paradigm grounded in reusability. Not a “thing”.
It is an evolution. Existing systems don’t change overnight (but we can evolve),
Enterprise SOA requires participation. It is not a spectator sport! It affects all areas of the organization.
Upgrades – Planning, Preparation and Implementation
Track B focused on upgrades and the issues associated with them. A couple of organisations shared their experiences, but the most useful one to me was the “Implementing Solution Manager” presentation from Dion Ellison. Having done installed Solution manager recently myself for a customer, it was interesting to see what differences there were between our philosophies. I had only installed it for some very simple Solution Monitoring. Dion’s customer had also installed Change Management and Test Management.
User Interface – Adobe, NW CE, Portal, etc
Track C focused on the current and new user interfaces.
On day one, Thomas Jung provided a very comprehensive roadmap of SAP’s future UI Strategy. The key takeaway was that the major tool for presenting data to the client is to be WebDynpro. The decision about whether you perform your developments in ABAP or JAVA should be based on what skills you have in house, and of course which particular usage type you are developing for (for example, Portals don’t have an ABAP engine, while PI systems have both).
The other takeaway is that whether content was presented via HTML rendering (i.e. browser of your choice) or the new NetWeaver Business Client would be determined at runtime. The big difference between the two is that a browser will expect HTML and Javascript, as it currently does, with the attendant data transfer size and rendering issues that come with highly structured generated code. On the other hand, the Business Client will accept a smaller file in an XML like format.
On Day two, Mike Nicholls presented on what we could expect from the next major release of the SAP portal. The key takeaways here were that your portal admin and content management skills are still valid, SAP have redesigned the architecture, providing a more robust platform for the portal, and that the end users probably wouldn’t notice the difference. As part of the redesign, the Portal will run in a SAP J2EE 5 supplied JVM, similar to the one provided as part of the NetWeaver 7.1 Composition Environment Java EE Trial Version. We will loose the concept of a J2EE Dispatcher (and therefore the Visual Administrator tool).
On the other hand, We are promised a Newer configuration tool,
more functions in NetWeaver Administrator,
an MMC style administration tools for non-Windows landscapes,
Some Web Dynpro portal administration screens,
newer (and IMHO hopefully more robust) version of NWDS,
and a newer way to deploy PAR files
Infrastructure / BASIS / Security tracks
Track D and E presentations tended to focus on infrastructure, BASIS and Security topics.
One of the more enlightening presentations (for me, anyway) was SAP Workloads in VMwareVi3, presented by Andre Kemp, Sr. Product Marketing Manager of VMWare Asia-Pacific. As part of the presentation, Andre showed a live VMWare ESX server, running on two fairly old physical servers. One of the first things I noticed was how dynamic the changes in resource allocation were; up there with the Workload Management available on larger hardware / operating system combinations (such as AIX 5.x on the larger P5 series machines). Andre showed how, under the same load, manipulation of the resources (CPU and memory allocation) altered the the percentage of utilisation on the SAP VM being altered, and on the SAP workload itself.
In a subsequent demonstration, by Tony Garland of ABB Grain, we saw how you could manipulate the VMs so that ostensibly production hardware could be taken offline with little or no impact, and how the VMWare Disaster Recovery Systems worked, by taking a ‘running dump’ of a live system.
Tim Bohlsen gave a 30 – 40 minute over view of his 2 day workshop. One of the concepts he introduced was Tuning for Response Time versus Tuning for Resource Utilisation. Tuning for Response Time is when you tune your system(s) till you get sub second Dialog response times, and leave it at that. Tuning for Resource Utilisation is when you lighten the load, either by tuning individual components of the response time more and more, or by getting rid of extraneous workloads (i.e running a job once a day instead of once an hour). In effect, as Tim pointed out, removing 50% of the load from a system prior to adding hardware means new hardware is TWICE as valuable. In fact that leads directly to one of the three key points from his presentation -
Even without a crisis, it is always possible to determine the tuning change with the highest potential.
Well tuned system use less hardware, in many cases MUCH LESS !! You can reduce your companies costs through pro-active work.
Squeaky wheels get oiled. BUT…. Shrinking or even removing the wheel can be MUCH more effective.
SAP HR/PY Structural Authorisations
I had added a new developer to the customer’s HR/PY landscape, but they couldn’t see any of the Employee Data in the Development or QA system. According to SU01, the roles and profiles were identical to a developer who could see the data.
After hunting around my disks (because it has happened to me before !!), I found a note about Table T77UA, which has prompted this reminder to both myself and any one else who has to work with HR/PY Developers.
HR Security
HR Security comprises the General Authorisation Profiles as managed by Role Maintenance (transaction PFCG), plus Structural Profiles. To assign Structural Profiles, you use table T77UA (User Authorizations = Assignment of Profile to User). The Structural Authorisation’s themselves are specified in the T77PR table (Definition of Authorization Profiles). You protect structures (or substructures) of the Organisational Chart by making relevant entries in this table.
- When you use both Structural and General Authorisations , a user’s Overall Profile is determined from the intersection of the two.
- The structural profile determines which object in the hierarchical structure the user has
access to; - The general profile determines which object data (infotype, subtype) and which type of
authorization (Read, Write, …) the user has for these objects. - The access mode for authorization objects in HR Master Data is determined in the AUTHC field (Authorization Level).
Steps to do Structural Authorisation:
- Use transaction OOAC (updates table T77S0) to Activate the Structural Authorisation switch
- Use transaction OOSP (updates table T77PR) to Create Structural Authorisation profiles. You protect (sub)structures by making relevant entries in this table.
- Assign regular Role Authorisation via PFCG.
- Assign Structural Authorisation profile to User Id. Apparently, some releases have a report RHRPROFL0 that you can use to assign the object id. However, I use transaction SM30 to update Table - T77UA (User Authorizations = Assignment of Profile to User).
- Organizational Plans are created using PPOCE
SAP Windows : Monitoring Disk usage
This will be useful for any SAP system running on Windows, or for your own desktop or laptop.
DriveSpacio is a free Windows utility for examining hard drive usage. When you first boot the program you’ll get a list of each hard drive and partition on your system, along with, some details like the files system, cluster size, and a pie chart or bar graph showing used and free space.
But the fun really begins when you click on the Folders section. You can choose a folder, or an entire drive (just click C: or E: or what have you in the browse window), and DriveSpacio will plot your folders on a graph showing you which of your folders are eating the most space. It takes a few moments to scan folders with a lot of subfolders or files, but the result is a pretty effective tool for figuring out why you’re running out of space on your hard drive.
WinDirStat is another free utility which does pretty much the same thing. But if you prefer the bar graph/pie chart look to WinDirStat’s more abstract-looking visualization, DriveSpacio is worth a look. But there is at least one area where WinDirStat holds the edge: while you can delete files from the WinDirStat interface, DriveSpacio only shows you file and folder names. It doesn’t let you launch or delete files.
From Shell Extension City
List of OSS Notes in a Support Pack
If Project Managers or Developers want to know if a particular OSS note will be implemented by a particular Support Pack, you can direct them (via http://service.sap.com/notes ) to the details of the particular Note. Sometimes, though, there is a large number of OSS notes, or they want to know ALL the Notes implemented in a given Support pack. You can get this list via the SAP Support Portal. The first step is to search the Software Distribution Centre ( http://service.sap.com/swdc ) for the Support Pack that you wish to list the Notes for.
Note that the Search Term field requires the full name of the Support pack, in this case SAPKE47080, not KE47080.CAR (which is the name of the download)
Searching for the Support Pack (or a list of Support packs, if you get the Search Term syntax correct) will produce a formatted list of the Support Pack(s).
You may recognise this screen as one you have used for downloading Support Packs or adding Support Packs to a Download Basket.
If you select the description (I have circled it in red in the screen shot), the browser will open another tab / window that has a hierarchical list of all Notes in the Support Pack. Follow the instructions on this screen to download the list.
Note that if you wish to drill down the hierarchical list, you can do so by selecting the line containing the SAP Component code
Repeat the search (if necessary) and download steps for each Support Package you need to produce a list for. Please let me know via the comments if this has helped you, if you have any questions about the process, or if you have any other topics you’d like me to write about.
SAP Enterprise Portal 7 - Modify Default Ports
An SAP portal installation, by default, selects a port for http and https access based on your system number. For example, if your system number is ##, then the default port for portal access would be
* 5##00 for http access
* 5##01 for https access ( aka SSL )
Many Project teams wish to shorten this long url (http://yourserver.yourdomain.com:5##00\irj\portal). Fortunately, there is an easy way to modify the portal http and https ports and keep it to 80 and 81 ( or anything you wish).
Follow the below given steps to achieve this.
1. Start the j2ee visual administrator tool
2. navigate to cluster -> dispatcher -> HTTP Provider
3. Choose Ports
4. Change the port number to 80 for http and 81 for https
5. Thats it - You’re done!!!!
One extra step that’s required if you’re also running IIS (for example, if you’re using an ITS to communicate with an older R3 system or running TREX), you need to make sure that your J2EE ports do not conflict with any of the IIS ports (including the default web server). The best way of doing that is to ensure that the IIS default web server is pointing at different ports AND is stopped.
SAP Enterprise Portal 5 - Modify Logon Page
The logon page is FormLogon.asp found in the SAPPortal directory of the Default Web Site under IIS
For those familiar with later releases of Enterprise Portal, you need to remember that when EP5 was released, the Web Application Server release of SAP had yet to be released. This meant that the portal server had to provide its own web server.