T122-2024 BIOVIA Notebook 2024 or later: Notebook may not start after upgrade due to failure to load type 'OracleInternal.Common.CustomSectionHandler'

Program

BIOVIA Notebook 2024SP1 and 2025

Operating System

Microsoft Windows Server (64 bit) 2016, 2019 and 2022.

Background

A Notebook issue has been identified where the Notebook web application named "RIA" in the IIS manager, may fail to start after upgrading to Notebook 2024 SP1 or later.

This is because of conflicting .NET configurations related to the Oracle Managed client for .NET, which is distributed with Notebook.

Workaround

How to check if you are impacted:

1. If you are able to log in to Notebook and the Notebook start page is displayed, then there is no problem and you do not need to take any further action.
2. If the login page is shown correctly, but after providing correct credentials, the Notebook start page does not display, use the following steps below to diagnose the problem:
3. Log in to the Notebook application server as an administrator user and open the RIA\web.config file in a text editor.
4. Check that logging is enabled for the RIA application. The appSettings keys LogDirectory, LogMaxFiles, LogMaxFileSizeInKilobytes and LogLevel should be present. LogLevel needs to be set to a value in the range from 1 to 4.  LogDirectory needs to be set to a path that exists and where the Windows user that runs the Notebook application pools in IIS has write permission.
5. If any of the keys mentioned in step 4 are not present, then add them like in the example below

   <add key="LogDirectory" value="C:\Program Files\BIOVIA\BIOVIA Notebook Software\Log\" />
   <add key="LogMaxFiles" value="5" />
   <add key="LogMaxFileSizeInKilobytes" value="5120" />
   <add key="LogLevel" value="2" />

Make sure that LogDirectory is set to the path where other log files from Notebook are stored, refer to for example the API\web.config file for the proper setting. Note that the installation path in the example reflects the default in a recent Notebook installation but may be different.

6. Save the file. This will trigger a restart of the Notebook web applications.

7. Try again to log in to Notebook. It is expected that this will still fail.

8. Open the most recent log file with a name starting with "Notebook_" in the directory configured in point 5 above.
Look at the end of the file for the presence of an error message containing

Could not load type 'OracleInternal.Common.CustomSectionHandler'

If such a message is not present, then don't follow the steps below because then the problem has a different root cause than described herein, and more general troubleshooting is required. Contact BIOVIA support if needed.

9. If you find the message mentioned above, the message will also contain the path to the machine.config file. Open it in a text editor.

10. Remove or comment out the following entry in the machine.config file, and then save the file:

<section name="oracle.unmanageddataaccess.client" type="OracleInternal.Common.CustomSectionHandler, Oracle.DataAccess, Version=4.121.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342" />

Note that the exact Version and PublicKeyToken may be different.

11. Try again to log in to Notebook. It is expected that this will now work.

BIOVIA Support

If you have any questions, please contact BIOVIA Support.