So, one fine day I finally decide to install Siebel 8.1.1.14 on my trustworthy computer at home.

• Download/copy install files – check.
• Uninstall old Siebel - check.
• Eat a bag of chips while seeing the uninstall progress - check.
• Install Siebel 8.1.1.14 Without reading any documentation - check.
• Get errors with Siebel install - check.

Do you want to read that again?

Yeah, real men don’t read documentation - especially when it comes to installations. It’s all point, click and click some more, right?

And, those men invariably suffer. Here’s a breakdown of two errors That shows how important it is to read the release notes. (well, it is only one error and the second one is just plain stupidity).

Error 1: SSACommonDllInit failed #

In my case it was a simple error that said -

SSACommonDllInit failed for enu (SBL-GEN-02505).

No matter where I double click – tools or client, the error refused to go away.

Now this is an error that I have probably seen during Siebel 7.7 days, but didn’t remember anyways. A quick Google search showed me that the installation media was likely culprit.

Rebuilding installation media did not help. And, I could actually see the same installation working for others in the group.

I could neither find the log files to debug, not the ENU folder in BIN. Only then I realised that I had been double-clicking on the module.exe.

Run “setup.bat” as an administrator and the installation will go just fine.

Error 2:  Invalid SRF #

when I start the Siebel client after this adventure, I get a warning:

ObjMgrQueryLog Warning 2 0000000254e10a14:0 2015-02-16 11:27:29 (query.cpp (14859)) SBL-DAT-00354: The query could not be run because the criteria for field '<?>' contained an invalid arithmetic expression.  Please ensure that the search criteria is correctly formatted.

The warning is followed by a crash of the client.

But this was what I thought would be quick debugging since we see this error reported almost after every upgrade. The reason is simple - sample SRF is compiled in older version of Siebel. And, no one bothered to replace that sample SRF.

Do a full compile with the latest version of Siebel tools, and you’ll be just fine. I did that, but the result was the same.

It turns out that the real reason was more simple. Siebel just had to get access in the firewall.