IBM Connections - Unpacking IBM Installation Manager on AIX

I "heard' this on the IBM Connections Community Chat on Skype last week, and thought it worthy of sharing here.

One of the participants was seeing this error: -

"The insall executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library"

when running install.sh.

After checking pre-requsities, disk space etc. our colleague realised that they'd fallen into an tar on AIX trap.

To quote from the Connections 3.0.1 documentation: -

(AIX only) If you are downloading IBM Installation Manager, the TAR program available by default with AIX does not handle path lengths longer than 100 characters. To overcome this restriction, use the GNU file archiving program instead. This program is an open source package that IBM distributes through the AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications at the IBM AIX Toolbox website. Download and install the GNU-compatible TAR package. You do not need to install the RPM Package Manager because it is provided with AIX.

After you have installed the GNU-compatible TAR program, change to the directory where you downloaded the IBM Connections TAR file, and enter the following command to extract the files from it:

gtar -xvf <Lotus_Connections_wizard>_aix.tar

This is something that I probably knew from my time in the IBM Innovation Centre in Hursley, but it was a good "reminder".

One for the kit bag …..