Installing RAD for Websphere as Non-admin User

March 4th, 2010 |

This posting will document the best way to install and setup IBM’s Rational Application Developer (RAD) for Websphere as a non-administrative user. I’ll be editing this along as I do the install and prepare the documentation for a group of developers at a large state organization.

To get started you would obtain the CDs or the installation media from IBM. In our case, we have the full downloads for Rational Application Developer (RAD) 7.6 for System Z. I found an article online for 7.5 and some of the instructions are a little different. Also, some windows paths have been changed. Once you have the downloads (zips), extract them all in a directory (as a general user) e.g. c:\RAD76 (ours is RADz76). Check in the setup directory for another folder or directory called InstallerImage_win32. Next, check to see if a file called userinstc.exe exists there. If yes, let’s proceed.

You’ll now need to prepare a small .bat file to execute the user installer to install the IBM Installation (Product) Manager silently as a non-administrative user to the user’s profile instead of c:\Program Files. Here’s the .bat file needed. Remember that your paths may be different.

echo off
SET LOGDIR="c:\temp"
SET INSTALLER="c:\RAD76\RD76_Setup\InstallerImage_win32"
 
%INSTALLER%\userinstc.exe --launcher.ini %INSTALLER%\user-silent-install.ini -log \
%LOGDIR%\Installer.log
echo on

The above script can be run in a cmd terminal and will silently install the IBM Installation Manager under your user profile. Under my user profile “dlwhitehurst” I now have … \IBM\Installation Manager and \IBM\InstallationManagerInstaller. This installation script will also write an entry to your Start menu “My Installation Manager”.

The next part is a bit more difficult. Another .bat file is needed to run the installer to setup and install RAD 7.6 and create a default WebSphere profile for testing.

The actual RAD installation was a little more difficult because we had downloaded separate media into our install directory. The media consisted of …disk1 and …disk2. The second .bat file is here. It was run but was unsucessful. I’ll explain how to fix after the script listing.

echo off
 
SET ILOGSDIR="c:\temp"
SET INSTLMGR="C:\RADz76\RDz76_Trial_Setup\InstallerImage_win32"
SET RESPONSEFILE="c:\temp\responsefile-nonadmin.xml"
 
del %RESPONSEFILE%
 
echo ^<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
echo ^<agent-input acceptLicense='true'^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
echo ^<server^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
echo ^<repository location='C:\RADz76\RDz76_Trial_Setup'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
echo ^</server^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<profile installLocation='c:\dlwhitehurst' id='IBM Software Delivery Platform'^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='eclipseLocation' value='c:\dlwhitehurst'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='cic.selector.nl' value='en'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.help.option' value='remote'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.help.url' value=''/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.was.v70.createProfile' value='true'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.was.v70.profileName' value='was70profile1'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.was.v70.profilePath' value='c:\dlwhitehurst\runtimes\base_v7\profiles\was70profile1'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.was.v70.enableSecurity' value='false'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.was.v70.username' value=''/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<data key='user.was.v70.password' value=''/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^</profile^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<install modify='false'^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<offering profile='IBM Software Delivery Platform' version='7.6.0.20090930_1054' id='com.ibm.rational.developer.systemz.v76.trial'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
echo ^</install^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
echo ^<preference value='%USERPROFILE%\IBM\SDPShared' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.eclipseCache'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='true' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.http.proxyEnabled'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='false' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.http.proxyUseSocks'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='localhost' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.http.proxyHost'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='9080' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.http.proxyPort'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='30' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.connectTimeout'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='30' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.readTimeout'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='0' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.downloadAutoRetryCount'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='true' name='offering.service.repositories.areUsed'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='false' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.ssl.nonsecureMode'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='true' name='com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.preserveDownloadedArtifacts'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^<preference value='false' name='PassportAdvantageIsEnabled'/^> >> %RESPONSEFILE% 
echo ^</agent-input^> >> %RESPONSEFILE%
 
%INSTLMGR%\userinstc.exe --launcher.ini %INSTLMGR%\user-silent-install.ini -input %RESPONSEFILE% -log %ILOGSDIR%\RadInstall.log 
echo on

When the above script was run, an error message was given stating that the silent install cannot be performed because of multiple media disks. Normally with a GUI install, the installer can stop and request that the user switch CD’s. A silent install is programmatic and therefore cannot interact with the user via a graphical environment. The silent install is running in terminal. The two disks are zipped and the paths in both disks begin with RADz76/.. This allowed me to extract the disks into RADz76 and now the disks were combined under one directory RADz76. I re-ran the installation script and it worked.

There are problems with the above script that did not affect the installation. The profile information would be fine for a RAD for WebSphere installation. What I found was that WebSphere was not embedded with the RAD for System Z install. I have installed RAD for WebSphere and both version 6 and version 7 were present. The RAD for System Z only contains support for WebSphere 6.