Installing Sybase on Your Linux Server - page 2

Why Look at Sybase?

The first thing to do is visit http://www.sybase.com, register there, and download neccessary installation software packages for Linux:

• sybase-ase-11.9.2 - server itself
• sybase-common-11.9.2 - common libraries
• sybase-doc-11.9.2 - documentation, in English, very usefulfor administrators or developers
• sybase-openclient - client for Linux (libraries) for server access
• README.txt - file with description of procedure of server installation

It is here that you may get a slightly unpleasant surprise, because Sybase for Linux comes only in RPM files. It's a big minus for Debian and Slackware users.

Now comes package installation. Here we need to have superuser rights, from xterm or some other X Window program--not the console (why this is so is something I will describe you a bit later).

Sybase is rather "heavy" software and it needs at least 260MB of free space on your hard disk to be installed properly. So, you should make sure, that you have the space:

df -k /opt
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              7234264   6086180    780600  89% /opt

Also, make sure you add the directory /sbin to the PATH variable if it's not there already:

export PATH=$PATH:/sbin

Now we can install packages:

rpm -hiv sybase-common-11.9.2-3.i386.rpm
rpm -hiv sybase-ase-11.9.2-.i386.rpm
rpm -hiv sybase-doc-11.9.2-1.i386.rpm
rpm -hiv sybase-openclient-11.1.1-3.i386.rpm

After complete package installation we need to edit /etc/profile next and add these two strings:

SYBASE=/opt/sybase-11.9.2
export SYBASE

These will define the system variable SYBASE, which will point to whichever directory Sybase is installed. If you skip this step, the server will not work. We also need to execute these commands from the terminal:

SYBASE=/opt/sybase-11.9.2
export SYBASE

Last, but not least, we will execute a shell script that will allow us to setup system configuration for server startup:

cd $SYBASE
$SYBASE/install/sybinstall.sh

This script will create the user and group called sybase.

Now we will configure the server.

su sybase
$ id
uid=507(sybase) gid=510(sybase) group=510(sybase)
$ . .profile
.......
Do you want to start 'srvbuild' now? [y/n]: y

Now we come to the surprise I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. srvbuild is an auto-executed graphic installation program. This is why you needed to start this process in X Window. (Strictly speaking, we don't need X Window server exactly on database server, we can just correctly set the system variable DISPLAY and work remotely.) We'll detail how this works in the next section.