On Track - ITIM 4.6

My ITIM installation is going much better now that I've had a chance to start from scratch a few times. VMWare is so invaluable here. I've got a clean Linux server with all the ITIM software downloaded and extracted. I created separate directories for all the components so that everything we need is easy to find. I'm running SLES 9 with Service Pack 3 applied as recommended by at least some of the components.

The DB2 install went great the 3rd time I tried it. Looking back now I think one of my problems was caused by applying Fix Pack 1 for DB2 V8.2. The fix pack installed just fine, however I believe I forgot to update the instance I had created prior to installing the fix pack. The stupid thing is that the error message you get when you try to start db2 does not give you any clue that the fix pack had anything to do with it. You have to run db2iupdt on each instance after applying a fix pack. It sure would be nice if IBM would just make that automatic when applying the fix pack in the first place. Anyhow, there is probably good reason for the way it works.

Once I was past all the DB2 stuff, the next component to install was TDS 6.0. There's a few other gotcha's with TDS, but for the most part if you follow the instructions carefully it will work pretty well. There are quite a few steps to do this right and for TIM you have to configure the referential integrity plug-in towards the end. A few of these steps can really cause you problems if you don't plan ahead and document things properly. Before installing any software I had already created all the user accounts I needed for the DB2 Admin, the TIM user, TIM Instance owner, and the TDS Instance owner. I documented each before hand so that during the install things would not get confused. So far so good. I'm at least part of the way through this. WAS is next and then TIM after that.

I'm documenting all the steps as I go and capturing screen shots as well. I'll call these my "newbe" ITIM instructions. Maybe they will benefit someone in the future. I'll post them as soon as I get through this and clean them up. So far the instructions are already 45 pages long, but there's quite a few screen shots.