翠花

Preface

The outstanding efforts of open source software are making societies opener and better. Many times people is willing to share knowledge and experiences in public domain. In business, it is different. I just got to know a true story that a graduate student got a much better position leaving his current company just after his mentor passed him many knowledges and skills about SAP APO for working purpose. Management often says that we want to have people willing to share. But the truth is that even good people fears to share.

Worse than that, big IT companies is making things more complex to protect their money. For example, I just read a message in SAP forum ‘SAP note 81*** details which versions of DB2 connect SAP supports. The last several supported DB2 connect versions have all been “special”‘. 81*** is a piece of SAP private knowledge system. Public users cannot access it. And IBM does not provider public information to its integration with SAP as well!

I decided not to have more complains now that I lost my job in SAP China already just because of a lawsuit against China Internet Censorship. I am a consultant now to bring my customer difference to survive and development. I am willing to fight, but I will see where is the efficiency. Let’s move on to the preparation of our action.

Install name server and select java and platform

Although I am going to have a central installation with everything in one box, SAP is still complex due to multiple components and relevant support from their vendors are always changing. Contact me if you have problem to find right version and information.

SAP EP(Enterprise portal) will start an application server and use naming resolve service. So it is better to have a DNS ready. Suppose we plan to have 192.168.0.103 named dnshost as DNS server and 192.168.0.199 named eccserver as SAP server. Our local domain is named intranetx.***.org. I choose BIND 9 in a separate Ubuntu box.

$ sudo apt-get install bind9
$ cd /etc/bind
$ sudo rndc-gen > rndc.conf

Then open the rndc.key file by your favorite editor.

key “rndc-key” {
algorithm hmac-md5;
secret “My secret key”;
};
controls {
inet 127.0.0.1 port 953;
allow { 127.0.0.1; } { “rndc-key”; };
};

Then I setup DNS server for internet connection via editing named.conf.options. Replace the forwarders {} section by my own DNS or my ISP’s DNS as below.

forwarders {
IP address of My DNS;
};

To specify my local domain, edit file of named.conf.local. Change it to below contents,

zone “intranetx.***.org” {
type master;
file “/etc/bind/db.intranetx.***.org”;
forwarders {}; //for intranet, naming service are processed locally
};
zone “0.168.192.in-addr.arpa” {
type master;
notify no;
file “/etc/bind/db.192″;
forwarders {}; //for intranet, naming service are processed locally
};

Then create A record and reverse resolving records. To do it, two files need to be edited, db.intranet.***.org and db.192. For the first one,

$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     dnshost.intranetx.***.org. root.dnshost.intranetx.***.org. (
5         ; Serial
604800         ; Refresh
86400         ; Retry
2419200         ; Expire
604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      dnshost.intranetx.***.org.
@       IN      A       192.168.0.103
dnshost      IN      A       192.168.0.103
eccserver        IN      A       192.168.0.199

For the latter one,

$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     dnshost.intranetx.***.org. root.intranetx.***.org. (
5          ; Serial
604800         ; Refresh
86400         ; Retry
2419200         ; Expire
604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      dnshost.intranetx.***.org.
103     IN      PTR     dnshost.intranetx.***.org.
199     IN      PTR     eccserver.intranetx.***.org.

Now we have name service restart.
$ sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart

We can check the naming service is running correctly dig dnshost.intranetx.***.org or eccserver.intranetx.***.org. In commont linux distributions like ubuntu and cenos, we can specify domain search of intranetx.***.org as default search path. In windows, generally we have to join domain of intranetx.***.org if we want to use short host name of other computers.

SAP supports Linux version of SUSE, EHL4, EHL5, Z-OS, etc. Now that CentOS declares it a clone of Redhat. So I narrowed my plan to CentOS4 and CentOS5. And SAP does not recommend 64bit.

We use 2 Java versions. One is IBM 1.4.2 and one is SUN Java version 1.5 or above. Otherwise we will encounter some problems of either GUI or CORBA. IBM 1.4.2 cannot start SAP install GUI. SUN Java does not provider SAP certified version in linux 64 bit. So we choose IBM Java. Finally I decide to use Centos4.8 which is the final version of 4 series. It would be very stable.

Install Java is quite simple. Then we set environment of JAVA_HOME and PATH.

$ export JAVA_HOME=”/path/to/sunjdk1.5″
$ export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Verify java -version have right output. And find the JCE file of IBM Java.

Then we install SAP locales by unzip and rpm -Uvh saplocales_rhel40_i386_version-4.

Next section I will start to set SAP server specific configuration and prepare SAP components and run the actual installation program.

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