It’s an IBMIM world. Or becoming one. Resistance is futile. Urbancode Release (UCR for short) is no exception. The new release uses IBM Installation manager, which of course I know and love from doing oodles of CLM and WAS 8.x installations (not to mention a dark past with other Rational tools:-). I suppose this made me somewhat gung-ho when installing UCR on a test Windows 2008 R2 64-bit server and promptly came unstuck.
First I downloaded and installed MySQL and created a database (schema) and user. I started to follow the instructions in the Urbancode Release Infocenter but found them a little bit obtuse so went with the Urbancode Deploy instructions instead. I knew those worked since I’d used them for a UCD install when writing Notes on integrating Urbancode Deploy with Active Directory.
I downloaded the installation media, unzipped it and just for kicks decided to do a silent install with a response file so I could repeat the process if needed. I downloaded and installed the 64-bit IBM Installation Manager 1.7 and fired it up with the following command line so I could record a response file:
ibmim -record IBM_UCR6.0_win.rsp -skipinstall c:\tmp
The details of how this works are in the IBM IM Infocentre, but it basically simulates an installation and stores the inputs into the file specified via the -record option.
Next I invoked IBM IM passing it the recently recorded response file like so:
IBMIMc.exe --launcher.ini silent-install.ini -input IBM_UCR6.0_win.rsp
A few seconds (really – seconds) later I had a brand new UCR installation.
Rubbing my hands in glee, I opened a command prompt with Administrator rights and ran server.startup.bat. The glee lasted all of a few seconds: after displaying some environment variable values a new window appeared and just as quickly disappeared. Of course I tried it again a couple more times , trying and failing to grab the new window.
Being me I was pretty sure it wasn’t to do with the silent installation, but I checked the logs anyway and everything looked good. So I resorted to some dirty work, editing the startup batch files turning echo on. This helped somewhat but I still couldn’t get the window to stop disappearing until I added /B to the start command in catalina.bat. I then found that there wasn’t something quite right with the java invocation and a good half hour later figured out that the PATH variable in the environment didn’t end with a semi-colon after the MySQL installer had added C:\ibm\MySQL\MySQL Utilities 1.3.4\ to it. I added the semi-colon and had the UCR server up and running.
That was coming unstuck Part I.
I had a running system but the server kept complaining about not being able to connect to a license server so I downloaded the Rational License Key Server (RLKS) media, fired up Installation Manager, pointed it to the RLKS repository and came unstuck again when I ran into an IM/RLKS version compatibility problem.
Back to square one, but lucky I had that response file for UCR.
Uninstalled UCR, uninstalled IBM IM 1.7.x, installed IBM IM 1.6.1, installed RLKS, updated IBM IM to 1.7, recreated the MySQL db, ran the silent install and all was well with the world again.
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