Installing a new Remedy server without running the installers (Unix only)

I have several issues with the BMC/Remedy installers for Unix. Personally I think they’ve needed some more quality control for a while, especially in version 7.0 and 7.1.

With 7.5 they’ve gone completely to GUI-based installers – meaning you need X-Windows (or a variant) or an emulator. That’s fine – but if you are installing multiple servers (Dev, Cat, QA, Prod) – why not just skip the install completely after you get the first one done? That’s my preference.  It’s easier – and more importantly, it’s FASTER.

In the following example we’ll assume the dev server name is “devserver” and the QA server is “qaserver”

Let’s assume you’ve just installed your DEV server.  It’s up, running and healthy.  So the next step is very simple: take a complete database backup of your ARAdmin tablespace (or better yet, the whole database if it’s dedicated).  We will refer to this as the “Baseline DB Copy”.

To install the next server (QA in this example) we’ll do the following:

1. Have your DBA creat the QA Database instance on the QA DB server and import the Baseline DB Copy.  Make sure the ARAdmin user gets full rights/roles.

2. Copy all of the install files from your install to a new directory.  In this example our DEV is installed in /SAN/DEVinstall/ar so we are copying all files to /SAN/QAInstall/ar and changed the owner/group to match the appropriate system user (if you are running non-root – and you should be if you are on Unix regardless of what BMC says).

3. Copy the /etc/arsystem/devserver directory to /etc/arsystem/qaserver directory.  Edit the armonitor.conf to change the server names and paths to the appropriate new server name and path.