Installing Tivoli Access Manager on Linux

An anonymous reader writes "Linux is quickly becoming a dominant platform for e-business and enterprise applications. The recent release of Fixpack 2 for IBM Tivoli Access Manager recognized this fact by adding support for Linux on the Intel platform. In *this tutorial*, you'll learn how to install and configure IBM Tivoli Access Manager on Linux. You'll also walk through some simple steps that will test your installation, including the creation of a WebSEAL junction."

Comments

innovation helped by commercial software

[nbarr]

Its nice to know that the market is evolving in the sense that new and better plataforms are being supported by commercial companies. In the last year we have seen a lot of companies finally releasing software for Linux. I expect this trend to grow a lot in the future. that will help innovation in the computer world.

And Lego just decided to use IBM's Tivoli

[$exyNerdie]

Great, now I am gonna read this tutorial, learn Tivoli and apply for a job with Lego. If you don't know what I am talking about, check this story on eWeek.

-- Sig
TODAY'S REJECTED STORY:
This story on Reuters says that Linux is gaining ground in India and according to RedHat, about 10 percent of India's personal computers will be sold with Linux rather than Microsoft operating systems by March, 2004. Besides the plain switch of desktop operating systems to Linux, analysts say the bigger worry for Microsoft is the growing use of Linux among India's pool of an estimated 400,000 software developers, many of whom churn out code for giants such as General Motors and American Express. CNET , ZDNet and Hindustan Times are running related stories on the rapid growth of Linux in Asia.

Great article!

[duffbeer703]

I missed the articles about installing Tivoli Framework and DB2 though!

Other than the warm fuzzy satisfaction that some will get because a commercial company ported their product, this is worse than even the most content-free Ask Slashdot articles.

Re:Great article!

[Mr. Shiny And New]

I agree. Do we need to have a /. article for every commercial product? Is this a big surprise that IBM is (gasp!) supporting Linux? Imagine!

YAAFCSY

[the_archivist]

Yet Another Advert For Commercial Software Yawn

Neat Idea . . .

[Dausha]

Perhaps when a site is offered that requires username/password for access, the submitter can create a 'slashdot' account for all?

For example, I provide 'slashdot4' with password 'slashdot' so anybody here can visit the site.

Do us all a big favor...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

And put "registration required" in the article next time.

JAVA Warning

[bruthasj]

Many of Tivoli's products are written in Java and it sucks memory up so bad your other critical processes will begin dying after you run out of memory. We had the Tivoli monitoring software installed on IBM x335 Series 1U servers for awhile. There are memory leaks, if you can believe it. One computer ate up to 950MB of RAM and killed our database daemon which partially brought down a production facility. This was an eventual process which took months and snuck underneathe the covers without our knowledge.

You've been warned.

Re:JAVA Warning

[Fly]

I don't think it has much to do with anything being written in Java. The same problems would arise were it written in C++. Java would help reduce the leaked memory given the same code design because Java would GC the objects not used. C++ would leave them behind.

Re:JAVA Warning

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, bad software can be written in any language so lets not start another "Java sucks but XXX is better" flame war.

For the record, Tivoli Access Manager ain't a Java application. The Web Portal Manager maybe a Java web application (ain't used it so can't say).

Re:JAVA Warning

[Anonymous Coward]

As an ex-Tivoli developer, I can tell you that most of the code base is C (and tons of perl scripts). There was push at one point to use java for the 'next generation' of TME, but I think that it got nixed.

Re:JAVA Warning

[bruce75]

I thought the focus was upon Access Manager and not all Tivoli products? Just thought I should point out what a sweeping statement this is and to set the record straight, the main components of Access Manager are not written in Java at all. The Web Portal Manager is a Java app(only used for web admin) and the product also has its own Java Runtime to do Authentication, Authorization and Administration to the core components that are not Java. The Java components are not even necessary if a the app being written does not need to utilize the product's Java interfaces.
Also, the Java GC would lend itself to having less memory leaks relative to C and C++.

Re:JAVA Warning

[bruthasj]

Well, it was actually Tivoli's Director software that monitors a cluster by extracting all the system information and allowing you to use a central system to manage everything. So, yes, it may have been too sweeping of a statement. Their failure to manage objects in a way that conserves memory usage brought one of my key production servers down, which in turn cascaded to other systems. This is not acceptable, in my opinion.

Therefore, I no longer use Tivoli's Director on these systems as the risk is much greater than the dividends the software itself produces.

Furthermore, I am quite familiar with the Java programming language, Garbage Collection, runtime environments. Blah blah. I know the pro-Java Extinguish The Myths sites preach: 1) Java isn't slow, and 2) Memory management is a past bygone of C programmer lore.

However, these anti-myth statements instill further programming rot in the brain of a programmer. Classes are carelessly created; CASE tools haphazardly spew out a mess of XML-encoded logic which is in turn molded into a maze of Java code that some how is supposed to emphasize RAD. All of which at the expense of properly run programs.

There are costs. And there is balance. Mine is a warning that states the applications I've experienced from Tivoli, with respect to Director, do nothing more than eat up your physical memory and your on-disk swap space until the O.S. is left with no choice but to kill processes to cope.

Maybe this is no problem on Win2k. Of course, there goes another wrench in the wheel of Java: being cross-platform independent. So, preach all you want about GC, runtime environments, abstraction layers from hell, platform independence and all the rest ... the fact remains its up to the programmer to wield the tools in his hand properly to construct a suitable program. Whether it's Eifel, C, Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Assembly, C++, Java, Pike, Python, Perl, Ruby or whatever I've left out.

Quick tip!

[timbrown]

Don't. We use Tivoli Identity Manager to provision user access on 300 odd servers at work. Problems include it losing subscribed servers, failing to create shadow entries and/or home directories, not being able to support company standard compliant passwords and crashing with nonsensical error messages every time we try to use it. If the rest of the Tivoli product line is of a similar quality, I'd suggest we'd be better off replacing it with a rather small shell script.

Re:Core Access Manager Components are not Java

[bruce75]

All Java points aside, this is about the Access Manager component of the Tivoli suite of products, which you are not speaking to. So why are you commenting in this forum about other topics that are not the focus. And again, the core Access Manager components are not Java.