I cannot remember how many times I’ve come on to projects, where though we were told that everything was in place so that we could directly start installing, in fact nothing was in place, no-one was available, and we just lost a lot of time. So, once and for all, here is my list of prerequisites that you please check to see whether you’ve executed all of them, before we come on site.
0. Make sure that you did upgrade your system according to the “Supported Platforms Guide” for your environment.
1. Have available a list of people that may help for the installation. Namely, these are a system administrator for the Unix system with root rights, and a dba who has dba rights on the database. Make sure these people are there and available and willing to help.
2. If you use Oracle as repository database for XI, make sure that you have created two users that are going to hold our repository and auditing schemas; so for example:
sqlplus system/manager@boxidb as sysdba grant resource, connect to boxir3cms identified by secret; alter user boxir3cms default tablespace users; alter user boxir3cms temporary tablespace temp; grant resource, connect to boxir3audit identified by secret; alter user boxir3audit default tablespace users; alter user boxir3audit temporary tablespace temp; exit |
Make sure that your database server and client are set up to use Unicode character encoding.
3. Create the Unix user, say, bo, for the installation and set the bo user’s locale (LANG and LC_ALL) to one of the supported locales found in the Business Objects Enterprise platform documentation.
4. Create a directory like /opt/bo underneath which the user bo has full rights and make sure that this directory has 20 GB of space available.
5. As far as ulimits are concerned, the bo user must have all set to “unlimited”, except for core and nofiles.
6. Make sure, as a root user, that the available environment variable space is sufficient:
chdev -l sys0 -a ncargs=512 |
7. Check the previous settings like:
getconf ARG_MAX |
8. Make sure that the Oracle client (or other client if you use another database) is installed, and that the environment of the user bo is set up such that he can connect to the database:
bo:/$ sqlplus boxir3cms/secret@boxidb select tname from tab; connect boxir3audit/secret@boxidb; select tname from tab; exit |
9. Have all the installation CDs or archives already copied and extracted onto some space on that system in a directory where the bo user has read access to.
10. The previous point also applies to any fixpacks that may have come out.
12. Make sure that you have all the installation keys that you require.
13. Again, make sure that you in fact do have all the installation keys that you require!
14. Have a workstation PC with Windows XP SP2, 20 GB disk space, 2 GB RAM, local admin rights, allowed access to memory stick and internet (proxy is o.k.), available.
15. Have on that PC a copy of putty and have verified that with that ssh client you can access the target Unix System as user bo.
16. If you are going to install the SAP integration pack, have executed all steps on the SAP side of the game (import of transports, etc.). Have an SAP person (from SAP or from your team) available to check these settings and to configure the integration pack once we’ve installed it.
17. Have available a list of things that you want to check to define that the system is working as expected. If you do not have such a list, we’re going to assume that – according to your licenses – the execution of one of our sample reports for each report type that you have a license for is sufficient.
Please make sure that you follow through this checklist very closely. Do not hesitate to ask us. Ask us rather before we come on site and everyone gets very annoyed as things are not in place.
