SAP Netweaver 7.0 with MaxDB Testdrive on Ubuntu 9.04 server
Last night I managed to get the SAP Netweaver 7.0 (2004s) with MaxDB TestDrive working on an Ubuntu 9.04 server. It took a bit of fiddling, and I am still looking at improving the installation, but I got the server up and running, which was wonderful.
I still mean to write up a walk-through of the exact steps it took to get it going, including the posts that helped me solve various problems, but for now, here are some of the points I remember:
For starters, you need to install csh and libstdc++5. This makes me think that the install won’t work on later versions of Ubuntu, because I don’t see a package with libstdc++.so.5 in any packages on karmic (Ubuntu 9.10).
During the installation, you get a message about grep requiring a value for the -e option. This is caused by the script that creates the fake network interface, which adds “-e” to the beginning of the new lines it adds to /etc/hosts. The network interfaces are created successfully, but you need to remove the “-e” from /etc/hosts.
Next, the .cshrc file of the n4sadm user (~n4sadm/.cshrc) contains a bad setenv option right at the bottom where the paths are separated by spaces instead of colons in a few places. Replacing the spaces with colons solved the problem. I am not sure whether this is caused by the install script, and whether this indicates some incompatibilities between the script and dash (which /bin/sh links to on Ubuntu).
To get the database started, I had to rerun a portion of the install script as per the instructions near the bottom of this post on SDN.
The demo license you receive from SAP is (thankfully) not a .rpm file like the documentation says (it was in the old evaluations), but installing it with saplicense -install did not work. I had to log on to the system and install the license with the SLICENSE transaction.
The main thing that I think remains to be done now is to fix the script that creates the fake network interface, and get it to run on boot.
The last time I installed an evaluation version of SAP on Linux was in 2001 on SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional (which I happened to have bought – I have not paid for a Linux distro since). Â Unfortunately the Linux Testdrives that SAP makes available are made to work on paid-for Linux distributions like RHEL or SuSE, so getting them working with a different distribution is somewhat of a challenge.
It sure is a thrill though to log into and commandeer your own SAP system. To misquote Jack Sparrow from the first Pirates of the Carribean movie: “Wherever we want to go, we go. That’s what a NetWeaver Application Server is, you know. It’s not just a kernel and a dispatcher and work processes; that’s what a NetWeaver Application Server needs. Not what a NetWeaver Application Server is. What the Testdrive really is, is freedom.”
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