OBIEE LDAP Problems? Try this! (repost)

On my previous project, we had been facing a very strange LDAP-related issue for a while, which prevented us from upgrading to OBIEE 10.1.3.4. The problem was that upon doing an install of 10.1.3.4, users who accessed the server using an LDAP account could no longer log in. Even worse, when someone tried to log in using an LDAP account, the entire BI server would crash and would need to be restarted. Our BI server was hosted on a Red Hat Linux environment, so the resolution of this problem is OS-specific.
After going through many rounds of trying to figure this problem out, we filed a ticket with Oracle Support. About 3-4 weeks later our problem was solved - we needed to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD. Apparently this was not being set after our attempted upgrades to 10.1.3.4.
LD_PRELOAD is a way of setting the priority of certain libraries, it loads the specified library first. This is called interposing libraries. Suppose you have an application that makes a call to some function that exists in multiple libraries. If you use LD_PRELOAD to load a particular library first, then the application will go to that library and use its functions, instead of some other library. LD_PRELOAD essentially replaces the functionality of another library.
So the actual problem was traced back to a possible symbol clash that occurs between libraries called by the application (OBIEE), and other 3rd party libraries. Our LDAP user logins are in the format of an email address, so it’s possible the mailto:%27@%27 symbol could causing the issue - I’m really not sure.
We ran the command:

export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libibmldap.so

Then we restarted the BI Server and Presentation services, and the problem went away!


This article was original posted on the Kevin C. oraclebi blog. See: http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/09/obiee-blog-lost.html


Till Next Time