Installing WebSphere and the Update Installer
March 8, 2006 Hey, Brian
|
I followed your directions explicitly regarding your instructions to me as to how to install WebSphere Application Server 6.0 on our new i5. I must admit that the process was so foreign to me that I had no clue as to what was happening, but by following your directions it all seemed to work. But I still have a problem. You don’t know how happy I was when well after an hour of running that QSHELL SCRIPT to install WAS 6.0 Express, it finished scrolling all its messages and it made me feel that all was well. To be sure, of course I did a GO LICPGM option 10 to be sure it was in the list. It shows the two parts and I know that it is installed now.
5733W60 *INSTALLED WebSphere Application Server for OS/400 V6 I appreciated all of your advice to get this installed. I am thankful that we installed the Java Development Kit at level 1.4 as you instructed, since I now realize that you need this to run WAS Express at Version 6.0.X Though you were kind enough to list for me the PTFs that were required for the WAS 6.0 to run, you did not give detailed instructions as to how to apply the PTFs. Your note suggested that For WAS 6.0 at V5R3, you need the following:
This includes the following other Group PTFs, which are necessary for WAS 6.0 to function:
I went ahead and did exactly as you suggested, and applied these PTFs and the cumulative PTF pack, as we do all PTFs. Though all seemed well and right after this long process was over, I recalled you saying that there was no autostart entry in the new WAS 6.0 and I got confused as to how to start this all up. Before I was going to bother you again, I went to IBM‘s 6,000 pages of PDF Web documentation that you referenced in your prior article and I was tickled that the installation manual was only 66 pages. As I was reading about the PTFs and trying to assure myself that all was OK with my installation, I came across something that I absolutely do not understand and that is the purpose of this question. What is this Update Installer process that the installation guide refers to and why do I need it. For your convenience, I included the text that confuses me immediately below. Please help me understand what to do about this. It is very confusing.
“When you install the group PTF, the latest fix pack (or refresh pack) is placed in the product installation directory. You must then install the fix pack (or refresh pack). To install the fix pack (or refresh pack), run the update script, which is located in the /QIBM/ProdData/WebSphere/AppServer/V6/edition/updateinstaller directory, where edition is: v Base, if you have WebSphere Application Server–Express, WebSphere Application Server for Developers, or WebSphere Application Server installed; it is v ND if you have WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment installed. For detailed instructions on how to install the fix pack (or refresh pack) after you install the group PTF, see the os400_readme_updateinstaller.html file located in the updateinstaller directory once the PTF has been applied. The fix pack (or refresh pack) installation instructions are also included in the group PTF information file. Please help me. –Marlene In many ways, IBM’s instructions for WAS 6.0 Express installation resemble those for the WAS Standard Edition 3.5 of about four years ago. You may recall that in my response to your initial query that I pointed out the 6,000 plus pages of documentation supporting this new release of WebSphere. I noted that I would not expect that IBM would not have written or printed 6,000 pages if there were no purpose for those pages. It is good that you discovered the newest wrinkle in the maintenance of WAS 6.0 software on an iSeries. Let me tell you what all this means. I also had concerns about the Update Installer function, and so I had a discussion with the very helpful people in the WebSphere area of IBM’s SupportLine technical support. This is new to everybody, unless you have been using Windows. The support person I spoke with explained to me that the updateinstaller was added because the iSeries WAS is redeployed from Windows. So, WAS gets built first in Windows and then for the iSeries. The Windows process uses the notion of an Update Wizard or Update Installer function to actually perform the code update after the fixes are on the system. So, for WAS 6.0, this development group got its way in making the iSeries process more like the Windows process. So, that’s why it is a more involved and uglier process. That’s not all. It is an extremely lengthy process and it can run from an hour to several days on iSeries boxes without a lot of interactive CPW juice. As many things with WebSphere on the iSeries, the instructions that suggested that the PTF process had changed were in stealth form within the confines of the 6,000 pages of documentation. There was no marking on the CD or a READ-ME-FIRST that came with the new WAS that would alert you that a lot of work would be for naught if you did not use the Update Installer function. To be fair, I learned about the Update Installer while I was chatting with a SupportLine person about an entirely different issue. To your credit, you read the documentation and found a reference in the installation guide. After installing PTFs on WAS systems for five years or more, I had no inkling that the PTF process that we all go through to become current would not update WebSphere code without this additional work. I found several references to the Update Installer after I was looking for it and finally I went right to the description of the Group PTF SF99301 for V5R3 and SF99300 for V5R2. By the time I got to the documentation, IBM had actually changed it so that the process would run in batch. The several day installations for those standard edition systems with no interactive CPW (less than 10 percent) was intolerable, to say the least. So, when I deployed I was able to use the batch command that was included with the PTF. Unfortunately, this command did not work on my system. It bombed and gave a “class def not found” message in the job log. One of the suggestions that the support team had for me was to change the CCSID system value. The support rep said that IBM ships systems with a CCSID value of 65535, but this is basically a nondescript code page that may or may not work with certain products, such as WebSphere. He recommended that I change it to English at 37. Even at this, it would not work for me. So, IBM took information about my system and went off to study hall and several days later I called back to find out if there was any news. The original person that I was speaking with was not in, so I got to talk to another techie who gave me a different version of the command to use. I had become so frustrated in the process that I chose to do it interactively, but since I am on remote DSL via VPN to my test system, my job kept bombing from intermittent network errors. It would run for well over a half hour before it bombed. If I went for a coffee, I would come back and it would be frozen and gone. So, I either was going to have to make a house call on the system or get IBM to fix the problem. The new command that I got–that was not as it appeared in the documentation–worked. Since we are working only with the WAS Express version in this article, I will give you that command exactly as it should be used on your system.
SBMJOB CMD(QSH CMD(‘cd In IBM’s directions, “/Base” is not in the path after “/V6” and instead IBM asks you to select what should go there. There is no WAS Express option. That is because, as I explained in my article, the WAS Express version and the formerly $5,000 and more capable and better performing Base version are now identical and are installed in the same IFS directory structure as the Base version. Also, note the semicolon after the word updateinstaller in the path above. This is a QSHELL mechanism to provide an end of line facility so that the QSHELL processor thinks that you have hit the Enter key between the commands. If you have modified the system default job description of QDFTJOBD, it is possible that this will not work for you as given. In this case, before you call IBM, I would suggest that you create a new job description with default parameters and this should solve that problem. If you have overridden job description parameters in your user profile, you may more work to do. I would suggest creating a new profile to perform this function. Don’t give up. Unfortunately, even with all of IBM’s help, we could not determine why the original SBMJOB as in the PTF description did not work on my system. If worse comes to worst, you can run these two commands interactively using QSHELL if you have a system with enough interactive juice. This would be as follows Start QSHELL From a command line, type in the following QSH Within QSHELL, type the change directory command from above /QIBM/ProdData/WebSphere/AppServer/V6/Base/updateinstaller When the system comes back with the $ sign, type in the update command update Depending on your interactive CPW, this can be a several hour or several day process. When the batch submission worked in my case, on a 500 CPW batch box, the update finished in less than a half hour. That should do it, and now you can move on to creating some profiles (formerly called instances or servers) using the Admin GUI. That is the quick answer above. To help you better understand the process, I am including some material below that amplifies what IBM is suggesting in its documentation. Additionally, I am including some caveats so that all software is at the right level for you to run well with WAS 6.0 on your 5.3 system. By the way, if you have a box at 5.2, most of this is the same. However the group PTF numbers are different for WAS 5.2. You can get those by picking the support option off the iSeries main Web page. Then pick fixes and then group PTFs. Summary of actions needed: When you install the group PTF, the latest fix pack (or refresh pack) is placed in the product installation directory. To get to the product installation directory for WAS, you can type in a “cd” command in QSHELL as we did above. Make sure “cd” is in lower case. IBM’s doc would look like the following: cd /QIBM/ProdData/WebSphere/AppServer/V6/edition/updateinstaller where edition for Express is: Base cd /QIBM/ProdData/WebSphere/AppServer/V6/Base/updateinstaller You can also walk through the entire directory structure using WRKLNK from a command line in i5/OS. Just type WRKLNK
From the root directory, choose /QIBM Within the updateinstaller directory, you will see a script called update. With QSHELL, once you reach the updateinstaller directory after typing in the change directory command, to see the directory contents, you must issue the all lowercase “ls” Unix command. Just type in ls and you will see the following:
QSH Command Entry
$
> cd '/QIBM/ProdData/WebSphere/AppServer/V6/Base/updateinstaller'
$
> ls
framework
lib
maintenance
os400_readme_updateinstaller.html
readme.txt
responsefiles
update
update.jar
version.txt
$
===>
F3=Exit F6=Print F9=Retrieve F12=Disconnect
F13=Clear F17=Top F18=Bottom F21=CL command entry
Once you are in the directory, you may interactively install the fix pack (or refresh pack). To install the fix pack (or refresh pack), run the update script as shown in the figure above. When you are in QSHELL and you are in the updateinstaller directory, you merely need to type in lowercase “update” and enter to get the process rolling. In case IBM changes anything in the future, and this is very likely, go to the PTFs page on the WebSphere Application Server Web site to determine which Group PTF you must order and install for your WebSphere Application Server edition and for your OS/400 release level. Remember that all product prerequisites listed in my prior response to you rmust be installed before you install the Group PTF package, or the WebSphere Application Server may fail when it is started. For example, the Java PTFs contained in the package are not installed if IBM Developer Kit for Java 1.4 (5722-JV1, Option 6) is not installed on the server. If you do not have JDK 1.4 on your system, then you must install it before loading the PTFs. The instructions below describe in detail how to install the WebSphere Application Server V6 for OS/400 group PTF. These instructions assume that you are ready to load and apply all PTFs included in the group PTF. Because some of these PTFs may require a restart of your iSeries server, the instructions include steps for placing the server in a restricted state and doing the IPL of the server. If it is not convenient to restart your server, you can load and apply the PTFs specifying that the PTFs requiring an IPL be applied at the next normal IPL of the server. However, do not attempt to start or use WebSphere Application Server until all of the PTFs have been successfully loaded and applied. 1. Verify that all of the “Verify iSeries prerequisites” in the prior response to you are installed. 2. Place the WebSphere for iSeries group PTF CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive on your iSeries server. 3. Sign on to your server. Your user profile must have *ALLOBJ and *SECADM special authorities. 4. Enter this command to bring your system into a restricted state: ENDSBS SBS(*ALL) 5. Enter this command from the CL command line when the system is in a restricted state: GO PTF 6. Select Option 8 (Install Program Temporary Fix package) from the menu. 7. Specify these parameter values and press Enter: Device: (Specify the device name of your CD-ROM drive, for example, OPT01.) Automatic IPL: Y v PTF type: 1 (All PTFs) Note: If it is not convenient to restart your server, specify No for Automatic IPL. Any PTFs that require an IPL are applied at the next normal IPL of the server. However, do not attempt to start or use WebSphere Application Server until all of the PTFs have been successfully loaded and applied. After all of the PTFs are installed, your iSeries server restarts, unless you specify No for Automatic IPL.
Install Options for Program Temporary Fixes
System: MYi5i5i5
Type choices, press Enter.
Device . . . . . . . . . OPT01 Name, *SERVICE, *NONE
Automatic IPL . . . . . . N Y=Yes
(Change to Y if auto IPL desired)
N=No
Prompt for media . . . . 1 1=Single PTF volume set
2=Multiple PTF volume sets
3=Multiple volume sets and *SERVICE
Restart type . . . . . . *SYS *SYS, *FULL
Other options . . . . . . N Y=Yes
N=No
F3=Exit F12=Cancel
8. After you have installed the group PTF, install the fix pack (or refresh pack) as described above. 9. After you have installed the group PTF, see the product release notes for information about the release, including a description of known problems and workarounds. The release notes are available on the WebSphere Application Server Web site. After you install the WebSphere Application Server group PTF, set up the initial product configuration To run the Update Installer, please remember the following: 1. End any WebSphere Application Server V6.0 jobs that are running. Then end the QWAS6 (WAS V6.0) subsystem if active. ENDSBS QWAS6 2. Start the host servers if they are not already active: STRHOSTSVR *ALL
3. Submit the update Qshell script located in the updateinstaller as noted above. 4. The installation is complete when the job ends. Check the updatelog.txt file located under directory /QIBM/ProdData/WebSphere/AppServer/V6/Base/logs/update/6.0.2-WS-WAS-OS400PPC64-FP00000003.install to assure that you have had a successful completion. The last line of the file indicates if the install was successful You will see one of the following:
Successful — (INSTCONFSUCCESS), Note: Depending on how much CPW you have the installation of the fix/refresh pack may take up to 4 hours depending on your iSeries system and it can take as long as several days on zero interactive systems. Now, you are ready to set WebSphere up so that you can run a test program such as the infamous SNOOP program to assure it is fully functional. If you run into any additional issues Marlene in setting up your instances (called profiles now with WAS 6), send me another note and I will do my best to clarify it. I wish you the best. –Brian RELATED STORY |
