Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Fix for Oracle VBCS "Error 404--Not Found"

We are using Pay As You Go Oracle VBCS instance and had an issue with accessing VBCS home page after starting the service. The service was started successfully, without errors. But when accessing VBCS home page URL - "Error 404--Not Found" was returned.

I raised a support ticket and must say - received the response and help promptly. If you would encounter similar issue yourself, hopefully, this post will share some light.

Apparently "Error 404--Not Found" was returned, because VBCS instance wasn't initialized during instance start. It wasn't initialized, because of expired password for VBCS DB schemas. Yes, you read it right - internal system passwords expire in Cloud too.

Based on the instructions given by Oracle Support, I was able to extract logs from VBCS WebLogic instance (by connecting through SSH to VBCS cloud machine) and provide it to support team (yes, VBCS runs on WebLogic). They found password expire errors in the log, similar to this:

weblogic.application.ModuleException: java.sql.SQLException: ORA-28001: the password has expired

Based on provided instructions, I extracted VBCS DB schema name and connected through SQL developer. Then I executed SQL statement given by support team to reset all VBCS DB passwords in bulk. Next password expiry is set for 2019/January. Should it expire at all?

Summary: If you would encounter "Error 404--Not Found" after starting VBCS instance and trying to access VBCS home page, then most likely (but not always) it will be related to VBCS DB schema password expiry issue.

2 comments:

Pandurang Parwatikar said...

Yes, this could be one of many reasons.

I have one more, where the support people say, it can also happen when a staged VBCS application is accessed, and the user saw a 404.

This is because user is trying to access resources, which don't exist. Resources have moved to a different folder, and this happened when the user's browser was idle. During this idle time, the application was staged again, and because of this staging the application's resources are now moved to a newly versioned folder in Weblogic/Server where VBCS is hosted.

Every time a application is staged, the application's resources are moved to a folder.

So, as the user after being idle for some time, and now in the same idle browser session, user clicks a button or fires any event which tries to access resources, he/she gets a 404

Thanks,
Pandu

Andrej Baranovskij said...

Thanks. Your use case seems different, not able to access app developed in VBCS. In my case - whole VBCS instance was unavailable.

Regards,
Andrejus