We've had a couple of situations recently where a customer didn't have easy access to the machine where their process scheduler server was running. The process scheduler was installed as a Windows Service and running under an account that the PeopleSoft team did not have access to.

So when something is not working properly, and an environment issued is suspected, how do you figure out what the environment even looks like? You can a) open a trouble ticket with whoever manages the technical environment and wait for a response or b) run a program under the process scheduler that will show you the environment information. We'll focus on option b for the rest of this blog entry :-)

In order to figure out this info, we created a simple App Engine program that does 3 things.

1. List the environment variables for processes started via the process scheduler. This is accomplished by grabbing the output of the set command that the Windows command shell (cmd.exe) supports. There is a PeopleCode function to check environment variables, but it does not support listing all known variables. Besides, we want to see what Windows says the environment variables are, since that is what our spawned processes end up with.
   
2. List all .cfg files that are found in the appserv directory and it's children. For psappsrv.cfg and psprcs.cfg files, we put the contents of those into our output. These files are what actually hold the values that you typed in when you were setting up process schedulers and application servers with psadmin.
   
3. Get the Windows security information for the files. This is mainly useful for troubleshooting things like a process not being able to save files when running.
   

The attached project has the App Engine code and a process definition for it. The process definition gives access to the ALLPAGES and TLSALL process security groups, but you can adjust that as needed. Since there is no online page for configuring the values fed into the process, the process definition just puts it into the System Process Requests page (PeopleTools -> Process Scheduler -> System Process Requests). The name of the process that will show up on that page is Environment Information.

I mentioned that there is no online page for configuring this, but there are a few minor tweaks that you can make in the code itself. At the top of the PeopleCode, there are 3 boolean variables that control whether or not to run each of the 3 steps listed above. These default to True, but if you didn't want to run the list of the file system security, you could just change that variable to False.

The other configurable part of the code is for picking which directory to use as a base. By default it will use the PS_HOME environment variable as a starting point (which will pick up everything underneath that), but if you need to look at a different directory you can change that to something else.

As for the output, there will be 3 files that you can view from Process Monitor. One is called gs_environment_info.txt. That contains the list of environment variables and should be self-explanatory.

The next file is called gs_appservprocsched_cfg.txt. At the top is the list of all .cfg files that it finds (the same as what you would see if you typed dir *.cfg /s at a command prompt from PS_HOME). After that it lists the name and then the contents of each psappsrv.cfg and psprcs.cfg file that it finds. If you only have one domain setup, then there would likely be one of each, but that will depend on your environment.

The last one should have been called gs_cacls.txt, but it turns out the cacls command (which ships with Windows and will list file permissions) does not like to have it's output re-directed. So we just let the process scheduler pick up the output and dump it into the Message Log file. Note that the Message Log file is different from the "regular" Message Log. The Message Log file is visible from the View Log/Trace page in the Process Detail page in Process Monitor. The "regular" Message Log is the list of messages that the process wrote to the database. The quick way to tell the difference is that the Message Log file is just a plain text file, while the other Message Log page is a regular PeopleSoft page with a grid on it.

In order to make sense of the file permissions that are listed in output, you'll want to read the Remarks section of this document from Microsoft that explains it (or take a look at this writeup that has what I think is a more clear explanation). Neither one makes it super easy to make sense of the output, but it's better than nothing. A future enhancement to this program might be to parse the output and display it in a more human readable fashion.

Aside from fixing up the display of the permissions and offering a page to launch this from that let you pick which options that you want, a few other nice enhancements to this would be :

• Make it work properly in Unix/Linux environments (I've just been building out an Oracle Linux environment for PeopleSoft. Fun!)
• Make these into callable functions and deliver an iScript that calls them so that they can run in locations where there isn't a process scheduler installed.
  
• Support using cacls to change permissions (might require the ability to run the command as a different user)
• Support listing out the contents of other commonly used PeopleSoft configuration files (e.g. pssqr.ini)

Of course, what would really be nice would be to feed the process instance of a process that died for some reason and have it go figure out why. That is (as they say) left as an exercise for the reader.

Labels: 2007, AppEngine, PeopleSoft, Windows