HOWTO: install WebSphere Portal 7 on CentOS 6.2

A short post about setting up a trial WebSphere Portal Express server on the (unsupported) CentOS operating system.

All install and startup tasks were performed as root.

Preperation

I used the CentOS-6.2-i386-LiveDVD.iso image to set up the operating system. The WebSphere Portal Express installer will not proceed on a 64-bit host.

An additional package is required:

yum install libstdc++.so.5

I used the following 60-day trial packages from the IBM site:

• WebSphere Portal Express V7.0 Trial WebSphere Portal Express Install & Quick Start Guide V7.0 (W-Setup,IL-Setup,I-Setup) Multiplatform Multilingual CZUD4ML.zip (211 MB)
• WebSphere Portal Express V7.0 Trial - Portal Server Express component (Disc 3 of 3), V7.0 (W-6, IL-6, I-6) Multiplatform Multilingual CZUD7ML.zip (404 MB)
• WebSphere Portal Express V7.0 Trial - Portal Server Express component (Disc 2 of 3), V7.0 (W-5, IL-5, I-5) Multiplatform Multilingual CZUD6ML.zip (259 MB)
• WebSphere Portal Express V7.0 Trial - Portal Server Express component (Disc 1 of 3), V7.0 (W-4, IL-4, I-4) Multiplatform Multilingual CZUD5ML.zip (696 MB)
• WebSphere Portal Express V7.0 Trial - DB2 UDB WorkGroup Edition For Linux on X86 32 For Express 9.7 (IL-3) Multilingual CZUE2ML.zip (941 MB)
• WebSphere Portal Express V7.0 Trial - WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment for Linux on x86-32, V6.1.0.15 (IL-1) Multilingual CZUE0ML.tar (946 MB)

Note: acquiring these files involes signing up to a free IBM ID and clicking through a few license agreements.

I wrote a script to prepare the images for the installation task:

#!/bin/bash
WPIMGDIR=.

mkdir IL-Setup
unzip -d IL-Setup $WPIMGDIR/CZUD4ML.zip

mkdir IL-6
unzip -d IL-6 $WPIMGDIR/CZUD7ML.zip

mkdir IL-5
unzip -d IL-5 $WPIMGDIR/CZUD6ML.zip

mkdir IL-4
unzip -d IL-4 $WPIMGDIR/CZUD5ML.zip

mkdir IL-3
unzip -d IL-3 $WPIMGDIR/CZUE2ML.zip

mkdir IL-1
tar --directory=IL-1 -xf $WPIMGDIR/CZUE0ML.tar

Installing Portal

I did't have much luck getting the launchpad to play well with the default browser, but it is possible to skip that and start the installer directly:

cd IL-Setup/PortalExpress
./install.sh -W nodeHost.active="false"

This will start a Swing-based graphical installer; use the -console switch for a headless install. With the exception of entering a password, I took the defaults. The installer takes a significant amount of time to run.

Running Portal

Since the First Steps applet relied on the browser also, I skipped that and used the command line to start/stop the server. This type of Portal install relies on DB2 to store its configuration.

Starting & stopping BD2

Interact with DB2 via the Command Line Processor for DB2 Client 9.7.1 using the DB2 user defined during installation:

cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/db2/bin
su wpx70db2

Start:

./db2 db2start

Stop:

./db2 db2stop

Starting & stopping Portal

Using the default permissions, it is necessary to operate these commands as root. The scripts are in this directory:

cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/bin

Start:

./startServer.sh WebSphere_Portal

Stop:

./stopServer.sh WebSphere_Portal -user wpadmin -password %lt;pw>

You can log into Portal using the URL http://localhost:10039/wps/myportal and access the WebSphere Application Server administration console via http://localhost:10042/ibm/console