Missing Windows ENV

[Former Member]

We are running ECC 6.0 in a Windows/Oracle environment, on Windows 2003 Server, x64. We upgraded from 4.7 the end of 2008, and at the same time migrated to new hardware, and have been running with no issues since that time. As we had consultants perform the ECC Upgrade and we were doing a corresponding CRM upgrade, I was not involved in the actual process and cannot be certain of each individual step that was performed.

Last week we had an issue with work processes restarting as scheduled, and then failing to reconnect to the DB with ora-12154 errors. We discovered 2 issues, and not exactly certain which was the true root cause.

The first issue we discovered were the sqlnet.ora and tnsnames.ora files were missing from the
..\sapmnt\<SID>\SYS\profile\oracle directory . I am certain that this was a main contributing factor to the DB connect failures, but it was not the only anomoly we found.

We also found that the User Environment variables for the <DOMAIN>\SAPService<SID> user account consisted solely of TEMP and TMP variables. We were able to export the variables from the <SID>adm user and import them into the resigtry for the SAPService<SID> account. We found these two issues at about the same time, so both were corrected before attempting to restart the DIALOG instances.

While I'm confident the oracle config files were required, is it possible that the system had to running successfully with the SAPService<SID> account not have all ENV Variables configured? Could these values have been pulled from another location other than the registry? Possibly a configuration file somewhere that specified the values?

We can find no traces of the ENV variables being deleted, as we did not perform the migration/upgrade of the system, I cannot definitively state that the ENV Variables were populated, but also cannot explain how the system has functioned properly for nearly a year if they were not defined.

Does anyone have any idea of how the system might have been functioning without these ENV variables? Just trying to determine if going down the path of identifying the cause of the missing ENV is correct or if I am missing another way this information can be stored.

Thanks

[markus_doehr2]

I can just guess here (as you):

Maybe someone deleted the users in the domain inadvertently - and recreated them immeditely after that. Since Windows doesn't store the user names but the user as a GUID, that GUID changed in the registry and hence all the environment set is gone because it's now a different user for the system.

I would check the audit logs on the domain controller (if activated) to see what was happening during that time.

The same problem also occurs if you e. g. move your server to another domain.

Markus

[Former Member]

Thanks for the reply Markus. I thought of that possibility but ruled it out as the GUID/SIDs of theSAPService<SID> accounts did not change. I am trying to track down how the ENV Variables may have gotten deleted with Microsoft Support, so I guess my main question here is if there is anyway this could have possibly worked previously if the ENV Variables did not exist. I am not exactly confident of the way this was configured before, as myself nor my team performed the installations and the migration from our previous hardware enviornments. I am personally not aware of any way this could have ever worked without the ENV Variables configured, I just wanted to rule out the chance that it may have been configured differently and the variables never existed int he first place.

Thanks again for your reply.

[markus_doehr2]

> I am personally not aware of any way this could have ever worked without the ENV Variables configured, I just wanted to rule out the chance that it may have been configured differently and the variables never existed int he first place.

It may have also been a virus spreading around if the system has e. g. direct connections from PCs (local or remotely) that are able to connect to drives. Or someone opened remotely the registry hive and thought it was local. Very difficult to track down.

Makrus