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CA SDM Considerations

Before you install CA SDM, consider the following information to ensure a successful implementation:

• Apache Server (UNIX and Linux)—If you are using the Apache Server on UNIX or Linux, some installations of the Apache Server disable the OPTION FollowSymLinks from the root directory. This option disables the default Apache integration for CA SDM, because the configuration file uses the /opt/CAisd symbolic link created during the CA SDM installation. To allow CA SDM to work with Apache, you can either allow the FollowSymLinks from the root directory (this must be done in the httpd.conf file) or modify the $NX_ROOT/bopcfg/www/CAisd_apache.conf file to replace the symbolic link with the actual path. In the CAisd_apache.conf file, change all occurrences of /opt/CAisd to the actual location of CA SDM (for example, /opt/CA/ServiceDeskManager). After making and saving this change, stop and start the Apache Server to apply the change.
• Browsers—Consider the following information:
  • (Firefox) Consider the following information:
    • You may receive an Unprivileged Script error when you use cut, copy, and paste functionality on the HTML editor page in Knowledge Categories. Click OK to view a technical note at mozilla.org, which shows you how to allow a script to access the clipboard.
    • When viewing the content of a file attachment in which the file name contains Latin-1 extended characters, a save as popup appears. You can either save to disk or click open and select an application to open the attachment.
  • (Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 2008) If the internet security level is set to high, the CA SDM URL and about:blank must be added as Trusted Sites for the web pages to be displayed properly.
  • (Google Toolbar) The CA SDM web interface may have a problem displaying the title bar text at the top of the window.
  • (Internet Explorer 8.0) You may experience periodic increased memory use when accessing the CA SDM web interface. This is a known issue with the current release of Internet Explorer. To release the memory, periodically minimize your main CA SDM web page.
• CA Workflow—Consider the following information:
  • If the privileged user credentials are incorrect during configuration, CA SDM may run but CA Workflow fails. If these credentials are incorrect, you may experience the following:
    • CA Workflow does not install. A bad username/password error is cited in /site/Workflow/wekinstall.log.
    • Tomcat takes excessive CPU, and/or the logfile /log/pdm_tomcat_CAWF.log is filled with security manager exceptions and AbandonedObjectPool is used messages.

    To correct this situation, verify the privileged username and password by logging in to the operating system with those credentials. Then, run the CA SDM configuration and specify the correct privileged username/password. If the privileged user password is changed, configuration must be run to set the new password.

  • If the privileged user credentials change after the CA Workflow installation completes, the CA Workflow process can fail. Complete the following steps:
    1. Log in to the CA Workflow IDE to modify the default CA SDM Web Service Actor.
    2. Select the Actors tab, expland the JavaScript tree, and click USDInitializer.
    3. Double-click Get Global Attributes.
    4. Enter the CA SDM privileged user name and password in the following fields under the script section:

       USD_Username = ""

       USD_Password = ""

    5. Modify these values in the $NX_ROOT\data\workflow\actors\r12_Service_Desk_Actors_en_US.xml file.
• Databases (All Supported)—Consider the following information:
  • If CA SDM has been configured with one database, and then the configuration is run a second time and a different database type is selected, configuration does not work. For example, if you initially configure for SQL Server and then configure again to an Oracle database. The workaround is to restart the computer before the second configuration is run.
  • Database connection information, if different, is not accepted in subsequent configurations. If an additional configuration is needed as a result of a change in the database connection information, delete the $NX_ROOT\NX.env file before proceeding.
  • If you have upgraded from Argis 8.0 to CA Asset Portfolio Management r11.2 and you are sharing the CA MDB (database) with CA SDM, you may encounter problems attempting to add or update assets in asset families using CA SDM. To avoid errors, you must define the asset extension tables to CA SDM using one of the following methods:
    • Use WSP to define the tables and the forms to view and edit the table entries.
    • Manually edit the tables and forms using the following guidelines:
    1. The file $NX_ROOT\bopcfg\majic\assetx.maj contains a template that can be used to create a majic file to identify the columns in the asset extension table to CA SDM. Copy this file and edit as appropriate, following the instructions located in the file.
    2. Create a .sch file in $NX_ROOT\site\mods directory to define the database columns. The files $NX_ROOT\site\assetx_schema.sch and $NX_ROOT\site\assetx_index.sch can be used as templates which can be copied and edited as appropriate for your asset extension tables.

    Note: Creating the form to display the asset extension data is accomplished using WSP.

  • SQL Server—Consider the following information:
    • Newer version of SQL Server has stricter user password credentials than in previous versions of SQL Server. Make sure that the CA SDM database password adheres to the password policies as defined in SQL Server. If the CA SDM database password does not meet the SQL Server 2005 password policy, the CA SDM configuration does not work.
    • (Microsoft clustered environment on SQL Server 2005) Within the cluster, you must create an alias for the SQL Virtual node name so when the cluster fails over, CA SDM can still connect to the same server name, regardless of which clustered node is active.
  • Oracle—Consider the following information:
    • If you install CA SDM on a UNIX-based system with an Oracle database, the privileged user must belong to the group specified during the Oracle installation. The Oracle installation group can be found in file named oraInst.loc.
    • When configuring to a 64-bit Oracle database on a 64-bit computer, the system library path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Oracle Solaris and Linux, LIBPATH on AIX) must point to the 32-bit Oracle libraries. The 32-bit Oracle libraries are found in $ORACLE_HOME/lib32. This is for both configure and runtime.
    • For configuring a 64-bit Oracle 11g database on a 64-bit computer, you must also install the Oracle 32-Bit Client on the server. When configuring the database, the system library path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Oracle Solaris and Linux, LIBPATH on AIX), it must point to the 32-bit Oracle libraries. This step is required for both configuration and runtime. Also, create a net service name on the Oracle client to point to the Oracle database server instance.
    • If you are using an Oracle database and you want to use existing tablespaces, you must create a Data tablespace that is at least 400 MB, and an Index tablespace that is at least 100 MB before configuring CA SDM.
• Externally Mounted Drives—When installing CA SDM on Linux with 20 or more externally mounted drives, you may experience a delay during the installation after the installation wizard pages and before the installation progress page appears. This is normal behavior, and the installation should resume after the delay.
• Install Shield and InstallAnywhere—Consider the following information:
  • If you receive an Install Shield error when trying to install CA SDM, wait until msiexec.exe stops running. Then try installing the product.
  • If you start, and then stop, the CA SDM installation on UNIX or Linux, you may see a directory at the root of the installation named install.dir.#####. This is a feature of InstallAnywhere. These files are not needed and you can safely delete them.
• Installation Home Directory—When installing CA SDM, do not install the CA Shared Components in the same directory as the CA SDM installation directory (NX_ROOT).
• International—Consider the following information:
  • You cannot use multi-byte characters for either the user you are logged in as or for the CA SDM privileged username when installing on multi-byte operating systems such as Simplified Chinese and Japanese. Doing so causes the installation to fail.
  • Do not specify multi-byte characters in file path names during installation and configuration. Doing so causes one or both to fail.
  • CA SDM must run on UTF-8 locale on Linux and UNIX platforms.
  • The Timespan Symbol names that are provided with the default CA SDM installation (Administration tab, Service Desk, Application Data, Codes, Timespans) are in English. For example, TODAY, YESTERDAY, THIS MONTH, and so on. For localized versions of the product, administrators may want to define new localized Timespans as required. You should not delete or modify the default Timespans.
  • Date formats in CA SDM do not support international specifiers such as, localized date-picture specifiers (for example, "jj/MM/AAAA" for French). The syntax is limited to generic specifiers such as "DD/MM/YYYY". However, many international short date-time patterns can be constructed from these generic specifiers (for example, "YYYY.MM.DD" would supply a common Japanese short date format).
  • For outbound plain-text email notifications, the NX_SMTP_HEADER_CHARSET and NX_SMTP_BODY_CHARSET options may need to be adjusted (directly in the NX.env file) to correctly tag the email message with the character encoding used by the international operating environment, so that it can be properly interpreted and displayed by recipient email systems. The default values for these options are set to UTF-8 on all platforms.
  • For non-English Oracle installations running on UNIX or Linux, you must set the NLS_LANG environmental variable before running pdm_init. The Oracle DBA should check the Oracle documentation for the value assignment needed for NLS_LANG.

    Important! If you do not set NLS_LANG, the Oracle client defaults to American_America.US7ASCII. For example, to test multi-byte Japanese in your environment, set NLS_LANG to JAPANESE_JAPAN.UTF8.

    Note: The NLS_LANG variable must be set in the same shell before running pdm_init. For example, setenv NLS_LANG GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8ISO8859P1

  • International users may want to adjust the DateFormat property in web.cfg to use the date and date-time formats best suited for their region.
  • International users may want to change from the default spell check lexicon (LEX_LANG option in the Options Manager) to a lexicon matching the language used in their region.
  • The English release of the CA SDM server is certified to operate in nine non-English language operating environments. For Windows, these environments must be fully localized regional releases of the supported Windows Server operating systems. In particular, Windows operating environments which utilize a Language Interface Pack or MUI running on an English core are not supported.

    Further, localized releases of CA SDM are supported only on the matching localized Windows server operating environment. In all cases, the system's "Language for non-Unicode programs" (default system Windows ANSI code page) must be accurately configured in the Control Panel's Regional and Language Options window to support the target certified language.

    Note: For more information about the localized releases of Windows Server operating systems, see the Localized Microsoft Operating Systems listing on Microsoft's Global Development and Computing Portal.

  • For knowledge searches containing multi-byte Japanese characters for International users of CA SDM and Knowledge Management to work properly with SQL Server only when SQL Server is installed with Windows collation. Make sure to specify the Collation option for your data during the SQL Server installation.
• IPV4—When installing on Linux, the /etc/hosts file must contain an IPV4 entry with the IP address, computer name, and the fully-qualified computer name. An example entry may look similar to the following:

  127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 
  141.202.211.11 usbegp11.ca.com  usbegp11 
  

• Short File Names—If you have disabled short file names on your Windows operating system, enable them before attempting to install CA SDM. In addition to enabling short files names, you must also set both the TEMP and TMP environment variables to a short file name, for example, c:\temp, after enabling short file names before starting the installation process.

  Note: For information, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 121007 on the Microsoft Help and Support web site.

• Special Characters and Spaces (Directory, Media Path, and Folder Name)—Consider the following information:
  • (UNIX and Linux) If you copy the installation media to a local hard drive, make sure the location does not contain spaces or special characters (for example #) in the directory path. If the location contains spaces or special characters, the installation does not work.
  • (UNIX, Linux, and Windows) Do not specify spaces in the installation media path and folder name. If you do, the installation does not work.
• Tomcat—Consider the following information:
  • Tomcat is set as the default CA SDM web server during the product installation. If you want to use IIS (on Windows) or Apache (on UNIX or Linux) as the default web server, run the configuration and select IIS or Apache when prompted, or re-run the configuration and select IIS or Apache.
  • If Tomcat is configured with external authentication on the primary server, you must set up a secondary server with a webengine and repository daemon to allow users who are not authenticated to use attachments. The Tomcat installation on the secondary server cannot use external authentication.
  • The CA SDM installation sets the Tomcat port to 8080. Other CA products, such as CA Asset Portfolio Management or the Service Delivery Suite of products, also default the Tomcat port to 8080. If you are installing multiple CA products on the same server, make sure you select a port number other than 8080 for subsequent CA Technologies product installations so they function properly together. To change the Tomcat port number to something other than 8080 for CA SDM, install the product or if it has already been installed, re-run the product configuration and specify an available port number for Tomcat when prompted.
  • After a restart, the CA SDM Tomcat process may not start properly. If this happens, stop and restart Tomcat using the following commands:

    pdm_tomcat_nxd -c stop
    pdm_tomcat_nxd -c start
    

• Users and Authentication—Consider the following information:
  • User authentication does not work if the system is using shadow files and there is an x in the password field of the /etc/passwd file.
  • On HP, if you have configured security so that system passwords are stored in /etc/shadow (for example, an x is stored in /etc/passwd in place of passwords), CA SDM user authentication fails, and users are not able to log in to CA SDM.
  • The password specified for the privileged user must conform to the password policy constraints imposed by the network domain. If it does not meet the constraints imposed by the domain, CA SDM configuration does not work.
• Web Interface and Internet Information Services (IIS)—To configure the web interface with IIS 7.0 on Windows 2008, you must install the CGI and Metabase Compatibility components of IIS 7.0. You can add these components using the Roles section of the Server Manager, by installing the IIS Management Compatibility modules.
• Web Screen Painter—Consider the following information:
  • When you install WSP as part of the CA SDM installation, it must be configured for it to work properly.
  • In a Web Screen Painter preview session in test mode, search filters are ignored on new tables that are not published.

More information:

How to Install CA SDM