Informix Machine Notes
Here you find actual Machine Notes to Informix Products that we prepared for you.
=================================
MACHINE SPECIFIC NOTES
FOR
IBM Informix Dynamic Server 11.50.FC7 PRODUCT RELEASE
On Linux zSeries
DATE: 19 May 2010
=================================
OS Information : Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 3).
Certified on RHEL 5, SUSE SLES 10 and 11.
System Requirements
===================
1. This product was built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4
(Nahant Update 3) for zSeries mainframe with 64-bit Kernel 2.6.9-34.EL
and glibc 2.3.4-2.19, using the following compilers:
gcc and c++ 3.4.5 20051201 (Red Hat 3.4.5-2)
The following packages have to be installed on your Linux system:
libaio-0.3.105
libgcc-3.4.5
libstdc++-3.4.5
ncurses-5.4
pam-0.77
This product has been certified on:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 5 (Kernel: 2.6.18, Glibc: 2.5).
The following packages have to be installed:
libaio-0.3.106
libgcc-4.1.1
libstdc++-4.1.1
ncurses-5.5
pam-0.99.6.2
- SUSE SLES 10 (Kernel: 2.6.16, Glibc: 2.4). The following packages
have to be installed:
libaio-0.3.104
libgcc-4.1.0
libstdc++-4.1.0
ncurses-5.5
pam-0.99.3.0
- SUSE SLES 11 (Kernel: 2.6.27, Glibc: 2.9). The following packages
have to be installed:
libaio-0.3.104
libgcc43-4.3.3
libstdc++43-4.3.3
ncurses-utils-5.6
pam-1.0.2
2. The UNIX graphical tools ipload, onperf and xtree only require
OpenMotif runtime libraries version 2.2.x. The minimum version is
2.2.3, i.e. openmotif-2.2.3 or openmotif-libs-2.2.3.
3. The Korn shell is required for the ISM and IDS alarmprogram scripts.
Install it as /bin/ksh.
4. If a suitable library libaio.so.1 is found, IBM Informix Dynamic Server
enables Kernel Asynchronous I/O (KAIO) automatically. Otherwise KAIO is
disabled. The minimum version of libaio is 0.3.104.
5. The High Performance Loader utilities, onpload, ipload and onpladm, require
a minimum of 35 MB of memory and 70 MB of swap space in order to run.
6. IBM Informix Dynamic Server uses the libraries and utilities provided by
the IBM Global Security Kit (GSKit) for data encryption and Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL) communication. The GSKit is bundled with the server and will
be installed on your machine as part of the server installation process.
Here are more details on the GSKit:
a. The GSKit is also bundled with other IBM products and might
already be present on your machine. If the GSKit was previously
installed, but is older than version 7.0.4.27, IDS will upgrade the
GSKit on your machine to version 7.0.4.27. If GSKit is not
installed, IDS will install GSKit in /usr/local/ibm/gsk7_64
directory on your machine.
b. The GSKit installation directory must have 30 MB of free disk space.
c. One of the following packages must be installed on your system:
RHEL 4 - compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.3 or later
RHEL 5 - compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61 or later
d. The RPM Package Manager is required to be installed on the system.
Check the following web site for the latest Linux system requirements
for IBM Informix Dynamic Server:
http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/linux/ids.html
System Configuration
====================
1. Kernel Parameters
The values of the kernel parameters that were used for testing this
product are given below. These values might need to be tuned depending
on the application and availability of system resources. They can either
be dynamically changed in the /proc file system or are defined in the
kernel sources and can be changed by rebuilding the kernel.
SHMMAX: 4398046511104
SHMMIN: 1
SHMMNI: 128
SHMSEG: 4096
SHMALL: 4194304
SEMMNI: 128
SEMMSL: 250
SEMMNS: 32000
SEMOPM: 32
- The value of the kernel parameter "SEMMSL" should be set to at least
100. This is the maximum number of semaphores per set.
2. Location of Shared Memory
The ONCONFIG variable SHMBASE should be set to the following:
SHMBASE 0x90000000L
Feature Notes (alphabetized by feature)
=============
1. High Performance Loader
User-defined conversion routines must be provided in a dynamic, shared
64-bit library called ipldd11a.so. This library is installed in the
$INFORMIXDIR/lib directory. You can set the location of this file with
the HPL_DYNAMIC_LIB_PATH configuration parameter in file pointed to by
PLCONFIG environment variable. For more details, refer the manual
"High-Performance Loader User's Guide".
Onpload will use shared memory during its execution. It will allocate
memory beyond the address for the server, leaving room for server shared
memory expansion.
2. IPv6 Support
IBM Informix Server supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (128 Bit Internet
Addresses) as well as IPv4 (32 Bit Addresses).
In order for the machine name specified in the SQLHOSTS file to resolve to
the correct IP address, the name services files on the operating system
should be correctly configured. If the machine has IPv6 address configured
and the listener thread is bound to an IPv6 address, then the name
resolution files /etc/nsswitch.conf should be configured to fetch IPv6
addresss. Also use the appropriate /etc/hosts setting if local machine
settings are used.
For compatibility with older IBM Informix client and server products,
assign the same hostname with both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address.
If the listener needs to be bound to an IPv4 address and the name services
resolve the name in the order of the IPv6 address followed by IPv4 address, then an explicit IPv4 address needs to be put in nodename field of SQLHOSTS
file. Client applications should also use the same setting.
3. ISMP - InstallShield Multi-Platform
A JRE is embedded in the installation program. If you have problems with
the embedded JRE, you can use your own. The minimum recommended JRE version
is 1.4.2.
4. Kernel Asynchronous I/O (KAIO)
KAIO is enabled by default on this platform. It can be disabled by setting
the environment variable KAIOOFF=1 in the environment of the process that
starting the server.
When using KAIO, it is recommended to run poll threads on separate VPs by
specifying NET as VP class in the NETTYPE onconfig parameter, e.g.
NETTYPE ipcshm,...,...,NET or
NETTYPE soctcp,...,...,NET
On Linux, there is a system wide limit of the maximum number of parallel
KAIO requests. The file /proc/sys/fs/aio-max-nr is containing this value.
It can be increased by the Linux system administrator, e.g. by
# echo new_value > /proc/sys/fs/aio-max-nr
The current number of allocated requests of all OS processes is visible
in /proc/sys/fs/aio-nr.
By default, IBM Informix Dynamic server is allocating half of the maximum
number of requests, and assigns them equally to the number of configured
CPU VPs. The number of requests allocated per CPU VP can be controlled by
the environment variable KAIOON, by setting it to the required value before
bringing up the server. The minimum value for KAIOON is 100. If Linux is
about to run out of KAIO resources, e.g. when dynamically adding many CPU
VPs, warnings will be printed to the online.log file. In this case, the
Linux system administrator should add KAIO resources as described above.
Note that the libaio.so library is required, regardless of the distribution
or kernel level.
5. Large Memory Addressability (LMA)
IBM Informix LMA provides the ability to support system configurations
with greater than 4GB of RAM. Most UNIX systems are limited to 4GB of
RAM based on the memory addressing limitations of 32-bit architectures.
The values for the following ONCONFIG parameters are increased from
32-bit to 64-bit platform by LMA support:
- The maximum number of buffers in BUFFERPOOL is 2147483647.
- The maximum of LRU queues for lrus field in BUFFERPOOL is 512.
- The DS_TOTAL_MEMORY, which is the total memory available for
decision support memory, is only limited by the amount of virtual
memory available. The sort memory comes out of the DS_TOTAL_MEMORY
memory and hence there is no explicit limit on the amount of sort
memory.
- The read ahead parameter RA_PAGES is only limited by the number of
buffers and therefore can be any value less than 2147483647. The
"chunk" write algorithm is not dependent on the amount of buffers or
shared memory and can write as many pages in a single I/O as possible.
- The maximum size of any shared memory segment is 4398046511104 bytes.
- The value for SHMADD is 4294967296 kilobytes.
Refer to IBM Informix Administrator's Reference manual for the
information about the related configuration parameters setting.
6. Network Protocols
The following protocol(s)/interface(s) are supported besides shared memory
on this platform:
Berkeley sockets using TCP/IP
IPC using stream pipe (implemented using Unix Domain Sockets)
To use sockets with TCP/IP:
a. NETTYPE in the ONCONFIG file and the nettype field in the
sqlhosts file entry must contain "onsoctcp".
b. To enable an IBM Data Server Client to connect to Informix
Dynamic Server, NETTYPE in the ONCONFIG file and the value data
of protocol in the sqlhosts file entry must contain "drsoctcp"
If a CLI or JCC client wants to connect to IDS via DRDA while
supporting SQLI connections you could add a DBSERVERALIASES entry
to ONCONFIG which corresponds to the sqlhosts file.
To use IPC (interprocess communication) with stream pipe:
a. NETTYPE in the ONCONFIG file and the nettype field in the
sqlhosts file entry must contain "onipcstr".
Fast poll is supported with TCP/IP and stream pipe interfaces.
FASTPOLL in the ONCONFIG file can be set to 0 to disable the fast poll.
By default the fast poll is enabled (value is 1).
Remote 32-bit applications and tools (example: ESQL/C, 4GL, ISQL) can
only connect to the IBM Informix Dynamic Server using the TCP/IP
protocol.
Local 32-bit applications and tools can connect to the 64-bit server
using either the TCP/IP sockets or the IPC stream pipe protocols.
The protocol used for supporting MaxConnect on this platform is "onsocimc".
7. Online Backup and Restore (ON-Bar)
ON-Bar uses the XBSA interface. Some of the functions invoked by ON-Bar
are in a shared library supplied by third party storage management vendors.
For ON-Bar to access the functions, the library must be installed in one
of the three ways noted below:
a. Rename the library to $INFORMIXDIR/lib/ibsad001.so.
b. Create $INFORMIXDIR/lib/ibsad001.so as a symbolic link to the
library.
c. Set the BAR_BSALIB_PATH parameter in $INFORMIXDIR/etc/$ONCONFIG
to the full pathname of the library.
8. Optical
The Optical feature has not been tested with the Optical Simulator.
The name of IBM Informix shared library for Optical is "iosm11a.so".
This library must be located in $INFORMIXDIR/lib (or must have a link
provided in $INFORMIXDIR/lib). Refer to the "Optical Subsystem Guide"
for more information about enabling optical functionality.
9. Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)
PAM functionality is supported on Linux operating system. The PAM is
dependent on the libpam.so library supplied by the Operating System
vendor.
Use of PAM can be enabled or disabled by the system administrator. By
default, IBM IDS will use the traditional authentication mechanism in
order to avoid widespread changes required by the users.
The PAM service identifies the PAM module. This PAM module typically
resides in /usr/lib/security and its parameters are listed in
/etc/pam.conf.
10. Processor Affinity
The processor affinity feature, that allows the pinning of a CPU VP
processor to a physical processor in a multi-cpu configuration, is
supported on this platform.
11. Secure Sockets Layer
IBM Informix Dynamic Server uses the libraries and utilities provided by
the IBM Global Security Kit (GSKit) for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
communication. The GSKit provides iKeyman utility (gsk7cmd_64, gsk7ikm_64)
and a non-java utility (gsk7capicmd_64) for managing digital certificates
necessary for SSL communication.
a. Product prerequisite for iKeyman utility:
The iKeyman utility requires the IBM Java Runtime Environment
(JRE) or IBM Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.4.1 or
higher with the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) security package.
b. Environment for iKeyman utility:
- JAVA_HOME must be set to the JRE/JDK installation directory
- PATH must include <JRE/JDK installation>/jre/bin
- CLASSPATH must include <GSKit installation>/classes/cfwk.zip,
<GSKit installation>/classes/gsk7cls.jar and
<JRE/JDK installation>/jre/lib/ext/ibmpkcs11.jar
c. Before uninstalling GSKit, verify that it is not needed on your
system. It is possible that software other than Informix Dynamic
Server requires GSKit. Uninstall by identifying and removing GSKit
packages using the command-line interface:
Run rpm command with the -qa option to obtain a list of installed
GSKit packages with their exact names.
For example:
rpm -qa | grep gsk
As root user run the rpm command to remove each package as needed.
For example:
rpm -ev gsk7bas-7.0.4.27
d. If you want to restore Secure Sockets Layer capability after you
have uninstalled GSKit, see the readme file in $INFORMIXDIR/gskit
for how to install GSKit.
12. Simple Password Communications Support Module
The name of the IBM Informix shared library for Simple Password CSM
on Linux is libixspw.so.
Features not supported
======================
1. J/Foundation
2. OnSNMP
3. MQ DataBlade Module
4. Basic Text Search DataBlade Module
5. Web Feature Service DataBlade Module
6. XML Publishing
7. Shared Disk Secondary Servers
Known Defects
=============
Refer to section I in doc/ids_defects_11.50.txt for the information
regarding known issues.
Defects Fixed in current Release
================================
Refer to section II in doc/ids_defects_11.50.txt for the information
regarding defects fixed in this release.
Defects Fixed in Previous Releases
==================================
Refer to sections III to VII in doc/ids_defects_11.50.txt for the information
regarding defects fixed in previous release.
(C) Copyright IBM Corp. 2002, 2010
