Completing the installation and running the Rational Build Agent on a z/OS system

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This section describes how to start running the Rational® Build Agent on a z/OS® system.

The agent runs as a standalone daemon and uses the default agent port 5555. To change the default port, use the port setting in bfagent.conf. See the section Configuring the Rational Build Agent on a z/OS system for information about how to locate the bfagent.conf file and change the default port.

Complete these steps to finish the installation and to start the Rational Build Agent:
  1. Start the build agent by one of these options:
    • Option 1: If you plan to use Ant with Enterprise Extensions builds, dependency builds, packaging builds, or promotion builds, the Rational Build Agent must be started from a shell script that has additional environment variables set. For z/OS, the Build System Toolkit contains a sample shell script that configures those environment variables and starts the agent. For more information, see Configuring the Rational Build Agent shell script.
      To start the Rational Build Agent, configure the sample started task BLZBFA supplied in the hlq.SBLZSAMP library by following the instructions in the job. You can run the Rational Build Agent as a started task at system startup. You must copy the job to a system allocated PROCLIB and set up required security settings in order for it to run as a started task.
      Note: If you include the PORT or PORTRANGE statement in PROFILE.TCPIP to reserve the Rational Build Agent ports, many binds are accomplished by threads in a thread pool. The job name of the Rational Build Agent thread pool is BLZBFAx, where BLZBFA is the name of the started task and x is a random single digit number. Because of the random digit, wildcards are required in the definition: 
      5666  TCP BLZBFA* ; Rational Build Agent

      Alternatively, you can start the startbfa.sh script manually from OMVS.

      Note: Starting the startbfa.sh directly as a shell script from the IBM® Developer for z/OS UNIX shells can cause conflicts because the ISPF gateway will pick up configuration files from the IBM Developer for z/OS rsed.envvars. To avoid potential conflicts, either start the Rational Build Agent as a started task, through Internet daemon (InetD), or configure it so it is invoked directly in OMVS on z/OS and not through IBM Developer for z/OS.
    • Option 2: Start the build agent directly. This method does not set up the environment variables required by Ant with Enterprise Extensions. Change directories to @pathPrefix@/usr/lpp/jazz/v7.0.2/buildagent, and use the -s option: 
      /usr/lpp/jazz/v7.0.2/buildagent/bfagent -s -f /etc/jazz702/ccm/bfagent.conf
    • Option 3: Start the build agent through InetD. See Configuring the Rational Build Agent on a z/OS system to start by using InetD.
  2. To test the build agent running on the z/OS system, use the telnet command to test the connection.
Note: The build agent typically uses administrative privileges such as root or admin to log on to the operating system. Additionally, the build agent runs all commands using the permissions of the user who started the agent, not the user name used to log in. If the build agent is not run as the root or admin user, then you might receive authentication errors when testing the connection. To run the agent from a non-root or non-admin user ID, configure the magic_login setting in the bfagent.conf. This is an alternative to standard system authentication. With this setting, the system can authenticate your login with a single user name and password. To see the steps required to configure the magic_login, see bfagent.conf Reference.