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Wednesday, September 24, 2014

WebSphere MQ & IIB on Ubuntu

I found that more and more people like Linux and this is a great things.
IBM Integration Bus for developers (free of charge !!!) is available for Linux distribution.
That's cool... however I find out that the installation may be always straightforward especially on the last Linux 64 bit distribution.
You will find in this small post what are the steps that I followed to install the package.

First I would recommend to install each component separately:
  • WebSphere MQ
  • IBM Integration Bus
  • IIB Explorer

Download the IBM Integration Bus for developers package.

I have used the single package download.

WebSphere MQ


Installation

Installing software on Ubuntu usually entails using Synaptic or by using an apt-get command from the terminal. 
Unfortunately, there are still a number of packages out there that are only distributed in RPM format.
Ubuntu is Debian based and therefore uses.deb packages to install. If you want to install .rpm packages, you first should convert them into .deb packages with a conversion software such as alien. Then you can use gdebi or dpkg to install them.
Despite the large version number, alien is still (and will probably always be) rather experimental software. It has been used by many people for many years, but there are still many bugs and limitations

IBM distribute MQ as a set of RPMs and with what I just said, I recommend to use "rpm" and hence install the rpm package: ‘rpm’, ‘pax’ and ‘default-jre’ packages.
Detailed information can be found in the following technote:

In my installation I have made first 
1. Install the i386 libraries
sudo apt-get install libc6-i386
sudo apt-get install libgcc1:i386
sudo apt-get update 
2. Define the system configuration (provided here after)
3. Install the different rpm package as explaine at the previous link (for ubuntu 14.04 I had to use the --prefix /opt/mqm).
4. Define the WMQ configuration

System configuration

I would recommend to change the system configuration for Linux when using WebSphere MQ. I provide the information here after but detailed information can be found in the knowledge center ( Linux System requirements).

create /etc/sysctl.d/50-webspheremq.conf with the following:

kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 268435456
kernel.sem = 500 256000 250 1024
fs.file-max = 524288
Make these changes live by running
sudo sysctl -p


Check that this has been correctly updated
cat /proc/sys/kernel/shmmni 

WMQ Configuration

You can use the setmqinst command to change the installation description of an installation, or to set or unset an installation as the primary installation.

Before executing the command, you would have to create the following directory “/usr/lib64”. 
Create this directory with the following command:
sudo mkdir /usr/lib64
This command sets the installation with an installation path of /opt/mqm as the primary installation:
sudo /opt/mqm/bin/setmqinst -i -p /opt/mqm

Add the user to the group mqm in order to be administrator:
sudo addgroup $USER mqm

IIBExplorer installation

Before doing any installation, you should first install the prereqs librairies (see corresponding chapter).

Install IBExplorer. Go to the folder “/extractedfolder/messagebroker_ia_developer/IBExplorer”.
If the installer is not executable, you would have to change using the following command:
chmod +x install.bin

launch the installation:
sudo ./install.bin

And start the IBM Integration Toolkit with the following command:
sudo strmqcfg -clean

IBM Integration Toolkit

Before doing any installation, you should first install the prereqs librairies (see corresponding chapter).

The installation is then straightforward, just launch the installToolkit.

sudo ./installToolkit.sh

IBM Integration Bus

The runtime is installed in a very straightforward way.
Just go in the directory where the tar has been unzipped and launch the setup.

Intalling Eclipse prereqs

The installation manager, the IBM Integration Toolkit and IBM Integration Exporer requires to have 32bit libraries. I have found issues to run the installation without installing the "ia32-libs".
In order to install this library I have used the following command:
 
sudo -i
cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
echo "deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring main restricted universe multiverse" >ia32-libs-raring.list
apt-get update
apt-get install ia32-libs
rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ia32-libs-raring.list
apt-get update
exit
sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib

And the following libs:
apt-get install libc6-i386
apt-get install libgcc1:i386