WebLogic startup failure – BackendRoot cannot cast to BackendStandard

My colleague from a previous company contacted me recently to help with a problem. OBIEE was not starting up.  They had a power failure the night before, and then OBIEE would not start up.  The system is OBIEE 11g on Linux.

This is the error that was generated when trying to start the WebLogic Admin Server…

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<Mar 28, 2014 9:11:35 AM EDT> <Critical> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000362> <Server failed. Reason: There are 1 nested errors: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.octetstring.vde.backend.BackendRoot cannot be cast to com.octetstring.vde.backend.standard.BackendStandard         at weblogic.ldap.EmbeddedLDAP.start(EmbeddedLDAP.java:303)         at weblogic.t3.srvr.SubsystemRequest.run(SubsystemRequest.java:64)         at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:209)         at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:178) > < Mar 28, 2014 9:11:35 AM EDT> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FAILED> < Mar 28, 2014 9:11:35 AM EDT> <Error> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000383> <A critical service failed. The server will shut itself down> < Mar 28, 2014 9:11:35 AM EDT> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FORCE_SHUTTING_DOWN>

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After trying a few things that did not resolve the issue, an online search helped with the solution. This post was very helpful: https://community.oracle.com/thread/2285489?tstart=0

After reading through the post, we went to the below directory on the OBIEE server (Linux) and examined its contents:

$MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/data/ldap/ldapfiles

[oracle@[SERVERNAME]]$ cd /u01/product/middleware/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/data/ldap/ldapfiles [oracle@aeledwpbi ldapfiles]$ ls -l total 11308

-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 10071624 Mar 27 08:40 changelog.data
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall    56940 Mar 27 08:40 changelog.index
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall   804359 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.data
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall     2028 Jun 25  2013 EmbeddedLDAP.delete
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall     3576 Jun 25  2013 EmbeddedLDAP.index
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall        0 Mar 28 12:36 EmbeddedLDAP.lok
-rw-r—– 1 root   root       615242 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.tran
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall        8 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.trpos
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall        8 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.twpos

Note how one of the files (EmbeddedLDAP.tran) is owned by “root”. It seems the power outage caused something unusual to happen resulting in “root” being assigned ownership of the file.

After having the system administrator change the owner from “root” to “oracle” (the OBIEE admin user), we were able to start the OBIEE system back up.