UDB 8.1 & 9 Installation notes - Fedora Core 6

[Phil Sherman]

A recent HD failure and next year's first quarter release of Red Hat's
EL5 made me decide to temporarily use FC6 on my sandbox system, an IBM
Thinkpad T40. UDB 8.1 (FP14) and a UDB 9 Express-C were successfully
installed after resolving some problems. Fedora Core 4 is mentioned in
the UDB install documentation as a acceptable base for development
systems and it appears that FC6 will support running DB2.

1. Neither UDB version will install from CD. The #!/bin/sh command that
starts all of the scripts fails. This is caused by SELinux not allowing
execution of the scripts from the CD. Fix by using one of the following:
A. Disable SELinux
B. Put SELinux into permissive mode. (Log errors and ignore them.)
C. Copy CD to a HD directory and install
I expect a future update from RH to the SELinux rules will fix this.

2. UDB 9 Java installation works with supplied Java. UDB 8.1 will not
install with Java. The Java included with the 8.1 UDB CD doesn't run
under FC6's 2.6.18-1 kernel. The UDB 8.1 control center will run under
IBM Java2-150 and Sun Java 160. I've never been able to get UDB to
install using the DB2USELOCALJRE and JAVA_HOME environment variables
since, I think, Java 131. (The test program always returns a bad return
code.) Install (8.1) by:
A. Use db2_install command. Install FP14 before creating the
DAS or DB2 instances.

3. UDB's libimf.so (common code used by many other programs) crashes
before it starts running. This will show up first when db2fmcd fails
and respawns fast enough for the kernel to diable it. (db2fmcd is
started by a line in /etc/inittab - usually the last line of the file.
The inittab entry is created when the first DB2 instance is created.)
Fix by using one of the following:
A. Disable SELinux
B. Put SELinux into permissive mode
Hopefully, IBM will resolve this by supplying an appropriate SELinux
policy statement with a future fixpak.
For my rebuild, I deleted the sqllib directories from all of the
instances (/home was undamaged), used root to reconstruct the ids and
groups manually specifying their id numbers to match the destroyed
system, then created new instances using db2icrt and dascrt. I then
issued a db2start command and recataloged all of the databases. FP14 was
higher than I'd previously had installed so I ran the rebinds that were
needed.

I hope that IBM does not delay approval of RHEL5 as a recommended
operating system for UDB.

Phil Sherman

[Darin McBride]

Phil Sherman wrote:

A recent HD failure and next year's first quarter release of Red Hat's
EL5 made me decide to temporarily use FC6 on my sandbox system, an IBM
Thinkpad T40. UDB 8.1 (FP14) and a UDB 9 Express-C were successfully
installed after resolving some problems. Fedora Core 4 is mentioned in
the UDB install documentation as a acceptable base for development
systems and it appears that FC6 will support running DB2.

1. Neither UDB version will install from CD. The #!/bin/sh command that
starts all of the scripts fails. This is caused by SELinux not allowing
execution of the scripts from the CD. Fix by using one of the following:
A. Disable SELinux
B. Put SELinux into permissive mode. (Log errors and ignore them.)
C. Copy CD to a HD directory and install
I expect a future update from RH to the SELinux rules will fix this.

Without a statement to that effect from RH, I don't think I would have the
same expectation.

2. UDB 9 Java installation works with supplied Java. UDB 8.1 will not

I'm not sure that this Java will work with RHEL5's SELinux policy.

install with Java. The Java included with the 8.1 UDB CD doesn't run
under FC6's 2.6.18-1 kernel. The UDB 8.1 control center will run under
IBM Java2-150 and Sun Java 160. I've never been able to get UDB to
install using the DB2USELOCALJRE and JAVA_HOME environment variables
since, I think, Java 131. (The test program always returns a bad return
code.)

Have you pursued any PMRs with IBM over that?

Install (8.1) by:
A. Use db2_install command. Install FP14 before creating the
DAS or DB2 instances.

3. UDB's libimf.so (common code used by many other programs) crashes
before it starts running. This will show up first when db2fmcd fails
and respawns fast enough for the kernel to diable it. (db2fmcd is
started by a line in /etc/inittab - usually the last line of the file.
The inittab entry is created when the first DB2 instance is created.)
Fix by using one of the following:
A. Disable SELinux
B. Put SELinux into permissive mode
Hopefully, IBM will resolve this by supplying an appropriate SELinux
policy statement with a future fixpak.

[...]

I hope that IBM does not delay approval of RHEL5 as a recommended
operating system for UDB.

What would "delay" mean to you? Immediate upon release of RHEL5? Within 30
days? 90 days? More? Note that the SELinux policy for RHEL5 appears to
be different from FC6, and it appears it does take a bit more work to get
DB2 to install on current betas of RHEL5. Of course, IBM will want to test
with the official GA of RHEL5 before claiming any level of support for it,
so there will be "some" delay - not sure how long that will be. Perhaps it
will be within a week or two, or perhaps not until the next fixpack is
released after RHEL5 is shipped (to incorporate fixes/changes).