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Getting ready
IBM's WebSphere Portal Server offerings are designed to enable a company to easily and quickly create an environment for the sharing of information with customers or internal users. WebSphere Portal includes powerful searching and collaboration features, as well as extensive personalization capabilities.
One of the advantages of WebSphere Portal Server is its ability to tie into existing systems like internal databases such as DB2, internal systems such as Lotus Notes, and directory and security installations such as Tivoli.
Of course, an installation like that usually requires an entire IT team to manage it, which effectively leaves out most small to medium-sized businesses. In response, IBM has designed WebSphere Portal - Express to be simple to install and use, and to require much less hardware and software than its other Portal offerings. It's also much more affordable for a small or medium-sized business, which also made it a perfect starting point for MetroSphere.
Portal - Express provides an environment in which companies can create entire portals, including the portlets that are the foundation of a portal system, on a single Windows box, with only a database (see Software prerequisites) required prior to installation.
WebSphere Portal - Express is a powerful software program, and requires a substantial server to run it. Specifically:
- Operating System: Portal - Express has been tested with Windows NT (Service Pack 6a) and with Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (Service Pack 2 or above).
- Disk space: IBM recommends that space of at least 2 GB be available, with at least 100 MB available on C: if C: isn't the system partition, because some support files will be installed there regardless of any other decisions made.
- Memory: Don't skimp here. IBM recommends at least 1024 MB of RAM, and they're serious.
- Processor: Portal Server is a database-intensive application; get the fastest processor you can.
In our case, we used a Pentium 4, 2GHz machine as our server, with an 80 GB drive and 1024 MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Server and Service Pack 3.
Strictly speaking, aside from the operating system the only software that must be installed on the server prior to Portal -Express is the database. Portal - Express can work with either of these two databases:
- DB2 Universal Database V7.2 with Fixpack 7
- Oracle 8i Release 3 (8.1.7)
Whichever you choose, it must be installed and running before you install Portal - Express. For information on installing and configuring these databases to work with Portal - Express, see WebSphere Portal database configuration and tips . See Operating system issues for more about the username and password for the database.
Our installation used DB2 Universal Database V7.2 with Fixpack 7 and support for double-byte character sets (DBCS) installed.
Gathering information: the worksheet
Before you actually start, there are a number of easy decisions you will have to make, involving issues such as usernames, passwords, and directory locations. You can find a great planning worksheet at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/pvc/wp/410/smb/en/InfoCenter/wpf/inst_infotable2.html. Print it out and fill in the information appropriate for your installation. For example, we didn't install an LDAP directory, so we could ignore the LDAP information. Also, for a Quick Install such as we're doing here, you'll only need to fill in the first page and a half of the worksheet.
For a Quick Install, you'll need the following information:
- The username and password for the Windows user that will be considered the owner of the HTTP server.
- An LTPA password. LTPA stands for Lightweight Third Party Authentication, and is how WebSphere Application Server communicates with an external LDAP server for authentication. If you've already set this up in WebSphere, make sure to use the same password. (If none of this sounds familiar you probably haven't set it up in WebSphere yet, and that's fine. Just choose a password; the installer will take care of it for you.)
- Database information. If you haven't got one of them installed already, decide whether you're going to be using DB2 or Oracle, and make sure that the database server is installed and running. The database can be local or remote, but if you choose a remote database, the client must be installed and running before you start to install Express. Choose the username and password with which
Express will store its information within the database. The default for this is the
db2adminuser (orEJSADMINfor Oracle). - Database settings. In most cases, it's best to simply accept the default values offered by the Setup Manager, and in this case those defaults include the database name and alias for the database in which Portal Server will store its information, the node name, and the database server port. If your current setup doesn't facilitate accepting the defaults, make changes accordingly. Also, for a remote DB2 installation, you'll need not only the user name and password, but also the remote database host name.
Before you can start installing, there are several measures that you will need to take to make sure that the operating system is ready.
First, make sure that the server understands its place on
the Internet. For example, we started
out with a server name of express, but didn't specify a default domain for the server. What we didn't realize at first was that this made the server's "full name" express., and
behind the scenes Setup Manager was trying to resolve it. That wasn't a valid name, of course, so the install ground to a halt. To prevent this, make sure to assign a default domain, and make sure that the name is defined within the domain. Our express box is on a DSL line with a dynamic IP address,
so we set the default domain to dsl-verizon.net,
and then added express.dsl-verizon.net to the hosts
file with an IP address of 127.0.0.1. (Ultimately, we'll reassign the box to metrosphere.com, but we didn't have DNS set up yet.)
Second, make sure that the appropriate usernames have been created and given the appropriate permissions on the system. There is a potential for the involvement of three different usernames: the user installing the software, the database user (usually db2admin) and the WebSphere user (in our case, wasuser). These users need the following privileges, which you can set by going to Start>Programs>Administrative Tools>Local Security Policy>Security Settings>Local Policies>User Rights Assign:
- Act as part of the operating system
- Increase quotas
- Replace process-level token
- Create a token object
Portal - Express requires either DB2 or Oracle, either locally or remotely. Our installation used a local installation of DB2.
When using DB2, it's crucial that the database be brought up to the appropriate Fixpack level, which in this case is 7. (Note: At the time of this writing, Fixpack 8 has been released, but has not been tested with Express.) Fixpack 5 is currently shipped with the software, and should be installed before you install Fixpack 7.
You can find all of the appropriate Fixpacks for DB2 at http://www-3.ibm.com/cgi-bin/db2www/data/db2/udb/winos2unix/support/v7fphist.d2w/report.
The Portal - Express Setup Manager is a Java application, and the Portal Server itself is a J2EE application, so obviously you'll need to have a Java runtime installed on your server. Before you go out and download the reference implementation from Sun, however, be aware that some components will perform better if they are running on IBM's Java environment. Fortunately, you don't have to download and install this separately. The very first thing the Portal - Express installer does is check your system for a Java runtime, and if it doesn't find one, it asks if you would like to install IBM's version.
To make sure that this happens, uninstall any other Java runtime environments you may have running before beginning the installation.
A Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server stores information that is optimized for retrieval, as opposed to writing. One common use is user or employee information. For example, usernames and passwords are an ideal candidate for LDAP storage because they don't change very frequently, but when they need to be retrieved, that retrieval must be fast to prevent impacting the application as a whole.
Portal - Express allows you to choose whether your want to store user information in an LDAP server such as SecureWay or Domino, or whether you'd rather simply keep all of the information on the database.
Portal - Express comes with the Tivoli SecureWay LDAP server, which must be installed first if it's to be used with the installation.
We wanted the simplest installation possible, so our test server uses database-only mode. (The Quick Install does a database-only installation by default.)
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