Sentinel reports do not show up in Crystal Reports properly

Running Sentinel it is often useful to access the Novell-supplied reports to get information from the system regarding the data being captured. The captured reports currently run in Business Objects' Crystal Server XI R2 for the latest version of Sentinel. A misconfiguration on the client or server side can cause the reports to not run or show properly. The Sentinel Solution Manager has the ability to publish and delete reports on the Crystal Server and may fail to do so with a misconfiguration.

A few settings may cause a problem that can be remedied easily. Things to check include:

1. Be sure you are specifying a host name and NOT an IP address in the URL to the server.

2. Ensure that the specified host name correctly resolves to the Crystal server. If necessary have a network administrator add a DNS entry, or alternatively, add an entry to the "hosts" file. Use "ping" or "nslookup" to verify proper name resolution.

3. Verify the username and password are correct? The default username is typically "administrator" and a typical password is blank until set by the administrator.

4. Verify that the publish and/or delete URLs can be accessed via a web browser on the same machine which is running the Solution Manager. Although accessing these pages via a web browser will return an error because of missing data, reaching these page at all means that the web applications were properly installed. The URLs to try are:

For a Crystal server on UNIX or Linux:

http:///esec-script/publish_report.jsp
http:///esec-script/delete_report.jsp

For a Crystal server on windows:

http:///businessobjects/Enterprise115/WebTools/Sentinel/publish_report.aspx
http:///businessobjects/Enterprise115/WebTools/Sentinel/delete_report.aspx

In both of the above examples substitute the actual host name in place of ''. If you get a page not found error or some other error indicating the page cannot be accessed correct the errors on the server and try again. If you reach the page but get a HTTP status 500 message indicating End of File (EOF) or a similar error, the web application is properly installed and should work when accessed via the Solution Manager.

5. For further troubleshooting turn up logging levels on the client. Edit the file $ESEC_HOME/config/control_center_log.prop. Add the following line to the end of the file (troubleshooting specific to installing reports):

com.esecurity.content.install.reports.crystal.level=FINEST

Restart Sentinel Control Center and try to install or uninstall again. There will likely be several exceptions logged, most of which are expected, but one of them may provide insight as to why the install or uninstall is failing.

6. Inspect the server side logs. For Linux and Unix these will be under the tomcat/logs directory in the Crystal install. For windows they will be in the location configuredby IIS. These logs can provide insight if something is not working on the server.