Basic steps in troubleshooting for newbies

Hi there,

you may never heard of me, or may be see my name here an there, and probably someone of you meet me, but anyway let me introduce myself.

I am Dobromir and my role is a Product Owner for SAP HANA Cloud Platform development tools.

In order to get full idea how the developers use our platform I observe closely the SCN space and OpenSAP trainings related to SAP HANA Cloud Platform for a while. Now, as result of this I make this simplified troubleshooting guide for those of you that just start to explore the platform, and want to make as much as possible alone. This is not a list of bugs, but rather a list of trivial and well known specifics of the underlying tools and environment that are easily overcome by the experienced platform developers.

1. Account creation process seem to be simple and straightforward. Most users do not see any problems here but I see that some of you do not really understand  the User/Landscape/Account/Application/Process model. In short landscape is like data center you want to use - either one for experiments and learning we have or the productive one located either in Europe, USA or Australia. Account is the space that you get on the landscape of your choice. And finally - you may use your account (space) to deploy and start your applications.
2. If you are SAP employee, then your SCN password is generated and you do not know it. In order to proceed further you should reset your password.
3. Getting SDK is considered more complex than just downloading the archive. This step was a real trap for most of you. Some of the questions you ask are:
   1. Why do I need and SDK? It is needed because it provide a local environment for developing applications, contain all examples you need during your learning process and finally provide a console tools for the platform.
   2. Why there have several SDK bundles and which one I should pick? If we assume you are in the beginning, then you will need the one that supports the biggest set of features, so all examples you will meet can run on it - so pick the Java EE 6 Web profile. To get more information about supported features from different runtimes see here.
   3. How do I install it? Just unpack it on your hard drive. That’s all!
4. Tools installation process was fairly simple for Java developers and pretty complex for those that were non familiar with Java and Eclipse. The difficulties are described in following questions:
   1. How to install Java on my machine?
   2. Why Java application do not start? - Seem that sometime OS settings are broken or not complete.
   3. Which version and package I should download from Eclipse.org? As we supports latest 2 releases of Eclipse, then it is safe to get latest available release of eclipse, and be sure that you get the "Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers” package.
   4. How to install Eclipse? Fast answer - Just unpack it on your hard drive. Long answer - see this link.
   5. How to set my networking settings in Eclipse? Be aware that usually you should restart Eclipse when change them.
   6. The installation repository seem to be wrong or missing? The data from installation repositories is cashed in Eclipse and when you setup your network you cannot proceed immediately with installation, as repository information seem to be wrong or outdated.
   7. I cannot open hanatrial.ondemand.com in browser, and I cannot ping it - what should I do? This usually means - lack of connectivity to our main datacenter. As first step contact your Internet provider and ask to check the connectivity to hantrial.ondemand.com. In most of the cases they will solve this for you, but if you are in some of the locations that have bad connectivity to European internet backbone - for instance some parts of China and Australia, where traffic to Europe passes through USA - the internet provider will not be able to help. The only working workaround for this situations we found so far is to use 3-th party free proxy service for installation (just google for such proxy). Be aware that this workaround is not secure at all and should be used only for installation purposes, as only public resources are accessed.
5. Setting up the tools after installation seem to be easy, but still not properly followed by some users.
6. When importing samples from SDK or GitHub your code refuses to compile. Possible causes are:
   1. There is no runtime defined in your workspace
   2. The runtime name is different from the one used when the imported project was created.
   3. The runtime name shown in the tutorials, samples or video lessons is missing? Actually it was renamed!
   4. The runtime type that you have is different from the runtime type used for project creation. As all runtimes we provide can be divided in 2 groups. The basic one (Java Web) and the extended (Java EE 6 Web Profile). The applications that can run on the basic one can run on the extended one, but the opposite is not always true. So in such cases you may need to install extended SDK, create runtime for it and adjust the runtime type of the project.
7. When using tools for local development - just few small obstacles appear:
   1. Used computer have limited resources.
   2. You can create only one type of local server - the same type of the SDK you have installed. Good point here is that  if you define runtimes of all 3 SDK types, you will be able to create all 3 different local server types.
   3. Your server refuses to start, because the ports he needs are not free. To check occupied ports you may use netstat command and either free required from server ports, or change the server settings to use different ports using local server editor and parameters launch configuration.
   4. You cannot work with document service - usually because there have some precondition steps that need to be executed.
8. When using tools for cloud development - really a lot of problems that we can divide in following groups:
   1. Compilation problems - the same as in local development (see below)
   2. Networking problems that have some of the following symptoms (see networking issues below).
      1. Add cloud server wizard hangs when fetch the supported runtimes.
      2. Starting or deployment of application take too long or hangs
      3. The Status of server missing inside Servers view.
   3. Authentication problems
      1. Wrong landscape - usually misspelled landscape or used the wrong one. You should use autocomplete feature where the landscape is asked and be sure you choose the proper one (for trial users it should be hanatrial.ondemand.com).
      2. Wrong user name. You may use your email as username, but you need to know that you also have a generated user name that have following format “P<numbers>” - we call it P-USER. This P-USER also can be used on all places where user name is expected.
      3. Wrong account - the user that you have is bound to an account (space) on specific landscape. For trial users that account have following format “<P-USER>trial”
      4. User or password is not valid - usually misspelled user or password. Be aware that several sequential wrong password attempts will lock your user for 60 minutes.
      5. User is locked. You should wait for 60 minutes before continue. It is good at such situations to cleanup your Eclipse secure storage.
      6. As first step when troubleshoot such problems try to execute the same step using corresponding console command.
   4. Authorization problems:
      1. User do not have access to this account - you probably provide a valid user, but try to access different account.
         • Double-check the account name that you supply in the wizard.
         • For productive landscape where you can have access to more than one account - check does your user is added to this account.
   5. Starting an application may hit the Quota limit
      1. You have a limit of 1 (one) compute unit that can be started on trial account. Good for you is that you do not have quota for deployed applications. So simply open the account page, stop the application that is currently started and then start you new application.

The links here are either to the official SAP HANA Cloud Platform documentation or to the discussions in SCN were more detailed explanation for issues can be found, together with proper solution.

So! That was the basics,

If there is no solution for your case, just ask in SCN :-)

Enjoy,

Dobri