Daily Archives: March 23, 2015

03.23.15
by

Searching For The Elusive 5.2.0-P8CE-WIN.EXE

In this month’s adventures of Connections installs I offer you my search for a required Filenet installer.  If you’re installing CCM there are 4 files you need to have in a directory for the Connections install to complete - from the install instructions here and shown below .  I’ve done this lots of times and you basically put the executables together in one directory you can point to during the Connections install.

However with CR2 came a requirement to update the installers see here and below

Notice the difference?  CR2 doesn’t list the 5.2.0-P8CE-WIN (LINUX, AIX , ZLINUX) file at all as a required update.  That means that all the other files are in Fixcentral but not that one.  So I want the latest file and I don’t know if there’s a newer one.  I go to Fix Central and search for 5.2.0-P8CE and get offered the 5.2.0.3-P8CP8 files.  I try to search for a download list for IBM Connections Content Manager but it doesn’t exist (I like the download lists because they often have the latest part numbers).  There is one for IBM Connections but that doesn’t include any of the FileNet components.

Off I go to Partnerworld where I type in IBM Connections Content Manager and I get an eAssembly to go through including the file FN_CE_5.2.1_WINDOWS_ML which sounded hopeful but I already had that and it contains the following. Note 5.2.1-P8CPE-WIN not P8CE.  The 5.2.0 files were no longer showing on Partnerworld under Connections Content Manager

 

Luckily I’m a paranoid control freak and have backups of all the installers myself and there I found the original FN_CE_5.2_WINDOWS_ML file which, when download and extracted had the correct 5.2.0-P8CE-WIN file in it.  The one the Connections installer wanted and refused to progress without.

 

The sizes of the zip files should have made me suspicious.  It does look like the 5.2.1 zip file in partnerworld has the wrong content (possibly because there isn’t a 5.2.1 for P8CE only for P8CPE) and i’m not the only one who goes cross eyed staring at P8CE vs P8CPE.   Or maybe I’ve been staring at this too long. Either way thanks to my backup I’m sorted now.

03.23.15
by

Adding DB2 Datasources Using db2cli

I recently blogged about Advanced Query Tool which I have started using on my VMs instead of one of the heavyweight IBM DB2 client tools.  AQT is a lightweight client that allows me to examine the databases easily but it works by reading in the datasources defined in Windows in the ODBC Manager.  To create datasources you must have some kind of DB2 client or driver installed.  I installed the minimal drivers which gives me this

Screen Shot 2015-03-23 at 11.18.05

Selecting ‘Configure DB2 .Net Data Provider” calls up a GUI interface that walks you through setting up a datasource.  To find the ODBC Manager under Windows 7 or 8 go to Control Panel and click on System and Security then click on Administrative Tools.

Each driver is configured to connect to a specific server and port.  The configuration is stored in db2cli.ini and db2dsdriver.cfg.  But what if you want to change the server or port address for a datasource.  Or in my case, add multiple datasources pointing to different servers?  Well you could try running the GUI tool again but that decision was made for me when Windows 7 decided to stop running the file and I decided I preferred to have more visibility / control of the configuration.  So instead I chose to use the command line to change and create new datasources.

Open an administrative command prompt and go to the DB2 client install directory (in my case c:\IBM\SQLLIB) and run

db2cli writecfg add -dsn PEOPLEDB_SA -database PEOPLEDB -host db2.turtlehost.net -port 50000

That writes a new datasource called PEOPLEDB_SA (you can call it what you want so long as it’s unique) that is connecting to a database called PEOPLEDB on server db2.turtlehost.net port 50000.  You don’t need to be able to connect to the database when you run the db2cli - it doesn’t validate or test at this point.

Now we need to add this newly created DSN to the Windows registry by running

db2cli registerdsn -add -alldsn

When you’re all done you need to restart Windows for the new registry to be read by AQT and you can go ahead and test the connection and use AQT to connect to the database by choosing the PEOPLE_SA datasource.