Windchill Rehost Utility 2.0

[MikeLockwood]

Recall some interesting threads on this subject in May / June this year... (lobster image).

Haven't touched it in a while but recently have gotten back to working with it. Now getting some success and gaining confidence. A bit tricky to get the property files configured and to learn how to work w/all but seems to be worth it.

Working with a client now who has never rehosted before - hoping to set them up routinely using the utility and get things fairly automated for them.

So -Wondering who is using the Rehost Utillty 2.0 and any comments on it??

Note: I'm preparing some "cheat sheet" documentation for it including a few diagrams. Interested if others have done so. Happy to share them.

[TomU]

Please share! I'm just getting ready to tackle this myself.

[BuddyHudson]

Hey Mike,

I am currently rehosting my 10.1 M020 system to a test server and it has gone fairly well until we (myself and tech from PTC) cannot get my Ldap adapters that were rehosted from my production server (where they work fine) to work. Every time we add them to the wt,properties file and try to start WIndchill I get a LDAP Error code 49 which is supposed to be something to do with the mapcredentials file. We have rechecked the AD bind user and password multiple times and nothing seems to fix it....maybe you have had some experience with this or maybe not....we use our corporate AD as login for Windchill....

Buddy Hudson

[GaryMansell]

Your problem sounds like it might be something to do with encrypted passwords - I see this when doing manual rehosts:

• Fix the InfoEngine LDAP Adapters Encrypted password issue that has occurred since 10.1:

xconfmanager -t codebase/WEB-INF/mapCredentials.txt -s "mapcredentials.admin.adapters=com.ricardo.Ldap^cn=Manager^<Password>"

xconfmanager -t codebase/WEB-INF/mapCredentials.txt --add "mapcredentials.admin.adapters=com.ricardo.windchill-test.ldap-pending^cn=Manager^<Password>"

xconfmanager -t codebase/WEB-INF/mapCredentials.txt --add "mapcredentials.admin.adapters=com.ricardo.EnterpriseLdap^<username>^<Password>"

xconfmanager -p

You will need to supply your own usernames and passwords and replace the adapter names with the ones to suit your system.

Hope that helps.

Rgds

Gary

[BuddyHudson]

Hey Gary,

I appreciate the information. Also are you saying that there is a known issue with this occuring in 10.1?

Do you think you could tell me what the difference is in the adapters? I have listed mine below:

wt.federation.org.APACAtlasAdapter=com.atlascopco.group.apac.apacldap ( for India AD)

wt.federation.org.AtlasAdapter=com.atlascopco.group.nasa.AtlasLDAP (for US AD)

wt.federation.org.defaultAdapter=com.atlascopco.group.nasa.Ldap (????)

wt.federation.org.enterpriseAdapter=com.atlascopco.group.nasa.EnterpriseLdap (????)

I know that I have two that are corporate adapters to provide AD authentication for users here in Garland, TX and users in Bangalore, India. What do the default and Enterprise do?

Thanks,

Buddy

[GaryMansell]

Buddy,

I don't think it is necessarily a problem in 10.1 - just that at this release all the passwords were encrypted so when you rehost a machine you now must re-create your encrypted passwords.

The default adapter is your Windchill DS Administrative LDAP

The enterprise adapter is an external enterprise LDAP - most likely Active Directory, I can't tell you more than that as i don't know your system configuration. If it is one you don't recognise, perhaps you have rehosted the main system before and it is left over from that.

I think we should take this offline now as this is not relevant to the original thread - pm me if you like.

Rgds

Gary

Message was edited by: Gary Mansell Edit: Corrected type of the enterprise adapter

[TomU]

I just finished my first attempt at using the rehost tool. Went pretty good. The first time I got it to start, it ran successfully all the way through. (It won't start if you have spaces in the path name, ex. "Rehost Tool 2.0").

Technically this might not be a totally fair test just because of the number of manual steps I took before actually running the rehost tool.

Here are the steps that I took:

1. Setup two new Windows 2012 R2 servers (R2 is technically not supported, I know, but it works fine.)
2. Installed all available Windows updates
3. Installed SQL 2012 on one of them.
4. Installed all available SQL updates (SP2)
5. Created a backup up the Windchill database from the production SQL server
6. Imported the Windchill database on the development SQL server
7. Used robocopy to mirror the filevault from production to development
8. Used robocopy to mirror the entire PTC folder structure from production to development
9. Copied the Windchill shortcuts from production to development
10. Deleted \PTC\Windchill_10.2\Java
11. Installed the latest Java 7 SDK to \PTC\Windchill_10.2\Java
12. Configured WindchillDS to start as a service (DS control panel)
13. Configured Apache to start as a service (built-in ant scripts)
14. Configured Windchill to start as a service (built-in ant scripts)
15. Ran the rehost utility in 'Clone' mode. Used the following modules:
    • InfoEngine
    • Database
    • Apache
    • IEAdapter
    • WVSAgent

At this point I started up the server. I knew there would be an issue with the remote file server (I didn't want to clone that). After everything started up I manually deleted the remote file server from the site and restarted again. Everything came up clean with no errors in any of the logs. Nowhere can I find any references to the old system, so it seems like the rehost utility did it's job.

[BuddyHudson]

Hey Tom,

Does your Windchill system use corporate LDAP for user authentication?

Buddy

[TomU]

No. Not yet. Just using the built in Windchill DS right now.

One of my next projects with the newly created test system is to figure out how to do this.

[TomU]

By the way, there was some discussion earlier about encrypted passwords. In my case I just chose to keep all passwords in plain text. It worked just fine.