Pentaho 3.6 Admin Console Configuration on Ubuntu 10.04

I thought I would post a note on the configuration of the Pentaho Administrative Console (PAC)... if you have modified the base-url property in the ../biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml file, make sure that the entry is also contained in your /etc/hosts file. Otherwise you will get a very uninformative error message when trying to open the Pentaho Administrative Console, even within a browser on the actual host running the Pentaho server. The message I got was Unable to connect to BI Server. Confirm user credentials and web setting XML configuration. Alternatively, you may get an error message at the command line when executing the PAC startup script (../administration-console/start-pac.sh) such as Unable to resolve host <hostname> Seems a bit ridiculous to me, but that's what happens.

For example, my server name is jupiter, and it's running the Pentaho biserver on a local subnet. In order for browser clients from other hosts to connect to the Pentaho biserver, I modified the base-url property from the default of localhost to jupiter.

Related configuration file entries:

../biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml

<context-param>
     <param-name>base-url</param-name>
     <param-value>http://jupiter:8080/pentaho/</param-value>
</context-param>

/etc/hosts

192.168.0.192     jupiter

This issue is covered in this thread in the Pentaho Community forums. I also recommend setting up the PAC server to run as a service at startup, in the same way as the Pentaho biserver.