Preparation and prerequisites
Before we start with the WebSphere Application Server installation, we need to ensure the correct installation media is available and that the operating system prerequisites have been met.
It is also important to ensure that there is enough free disk space on your filesystem, and that you also have a large enough folder or /tmp, c:/temp for Windows. A recommended size for the tmp folder is 1 Gigabyte; this will also cater for the deployment of large JEE applications. The installer program checks for required space before calling the WAS installation wizard and will inform you if there is not enough disk space; however, it is good to be prepared upfront to minimize such issues.
Note
It is recommended best practice that you refer to the IBM documentation for installation prerequisites, which can be found at the following URL: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27021246.
Windows installation prerequisites
There are no specific prerequisites for this book, except that it is recommended that you install using a user with Administration privileges. To give a user, the required administrator privileges is as simple as adding the desired user to the Windows administrators group.
Linux installation prerequisites
If you are not using Linux, then you can skip this section and move onto the Graphical Installation section. If you are considering running WAS 8 on a Linux platform visit the following IBM URL to locate and read up on the prerequisites for installing WebSphere Application Server 8 on Linux platforms:
Installing as root on Linux
When installing WAS on a UNIX-like platform, Linux, you should install using the root user or appropriate sudo access. After the installation is complete, the ownership of the installation binaries should be changed to an appropriate non-root user.
It is often company policy for production environments not to allow products such as WAS as the Linux root user for reasons, such as security and the configurability of shell environment variables and shell profiles. Another very good reason to use a non-root user is that you can apply settings to the Linux profile for the user account assigned to WAS, thus segregating WAS or application-specific settings away from other systems, which may also be running on the same machine.
While learning WAS and to keep things simple, without getting sidetracked by security and folder permission errors, it is recommended that you install and run WAS instances as the root user on Linux. Using root will ensure WAS installations will work with all the third-party products that we will install throughout this book.
Filesystem preparation for Linux
Before running the WAS installation, we need to check the umask. The umask setting controls the permissions that will be masked (not set) for any newly created files, for example, 022. By using the Linux command umask, we can check the current umask. It needs to be set to 022. We can set this by typing the following command in a secure shell:
umask 022
Using the umask command ensures that all new files will be set with the 8-bit inverse permission of 755.