Ah the joy of installing Essbase on Unix. Even better installing it on Linux. Installing on Linux took some doing. So with some fits and starts, a major doozie and some finagling, we have an instance running Oracle EPM 11.1! If any of you folks out there want to play with 11.1, shoot us a note and we'll hook you up.

Downloading the Files

I downloaded all the installation zips from edelivery.oracle.com. Here is a little timesaver. I got tired of clicking each item, downloading them and then uploading them to the server. So I used wget to download all the files at once directly on to the server.

Wait! before you rush off to try it, realize that oracle does want you to acknowledge they exist and that you agree to all their license and export validation terms. So if you try using the link with wget directly it will fail. So to work around that, you need to use a little cookie magic. Download the Export Cookies add-on for Firefox, Install, restart Firefox.

Goto the edelivery website, accept the terms of the export validation, once you are past that screen and ready to download, go to Tools > Export Cookies. This produces a cookies.txt file. Upload this file to the server. Right click on the download button and copy the link. Now you can use wget with the following format:
wget --cookiesfile cookies.txt "copied url" -O filename.zip

For example, 

wget --load-cookies cookies.txt "http://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/process_download/V14635-01.zip?file_id=25531220&aru=10674258&userid=1198665&egroup_aru_number=
10711138&email=xxxxxxx&country_id=840&patch_file=V14635-01.zip" -O foundation_svcs_1_of_3.zip 

I put all the files I want to download into a script and then kicked it off. Using our hosted environment on Amazon Web Services, I was able to download all of them in less than 10 minutes. I then uploaded them to S3 for other installs.

What is interesting about this new installer is that the installation package is the same across all the platforms. Yup thats right,  you can reuse the same install for Windows, or any other platform. You don't have to download it over and over for each platform! I like it.

Installing Shared Services and Essbase

Being the Apple fanboy that I am, I took the easy way out and did the installation using using os x, using X windows. This made it much easier than the old method of -console. Naren wrote up a how-to on doing this on windows here. I installed the basics, Shared Services and Essbase, and used the defaults

Welcome Screen

Hyperion Home 

Installation Type

I used the individual option, to control exactly what I wanted to install

Here we go....

WARNING: could not write using log service: ServiceException: (error code = 200; message = "Could not create directory /f360/hyperion"; severity = 0; exception = [java.io.IOException: Could not create directory /f360/hyperion]) (Nov 20, 2008 11:42:46 PM), Install, com.installshield.product.conditions.PlatformProductBeanCondition, dbg.platform, condition platform: displayName=Windows (All);name=Windows .*;version=.*;arch=.*;parent=

Hmm, I could have sworn I set a new HYPERION_HOME - /mnt/oracle. Yup I did, but it still took the old one - /f360/hyperion. Somewhere in the installer it is hard coded to use the $HYPERION_HOME variable.

Update: This has been identified as a bug by the good guys in Development: "If you delete the .hyperion.* file but leave HYPERION_HOME environment there, it confuses the installer"

To clear the current install:

-bash-3.00$ unset HYPERION_HOME
-bash-3.00$ rm -f .hyperion.domU-12-31-38-00-2A-51 
-bash-3.00$ rm -f set_hyphome_domU-12-31-38-00-2A-51_1.sh
-bash-3.00$ rm -rf /mnt/oracle/*

2nd Attempt

Repeated the above steps, everything installed. Yea!

Configure the Installation

On to the configuration. I usually configure items one at a time so if there are issues, I can pick up from where I left off. So first we'll do Shared Services. 

-bash-3.00$ cd $HYPERION_HOME/common/config/9.5.0.0
-bash-3.00$ ./configtool.sh 

After accepting the defaults and running the configure,  Uh Oh:

java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: /mnt/oracle/products/Foundation/openLDAP/startOpenLDAP.sh: not found

The installation doesn't install OpenLDAP, so shared services wont start! Oy! how did they miss that one? This is not the case for the Windows install. I am not sure about other linux installations. I will know about the 64-bit install later next week. 

Because openLDAP is an open-source package and is mostly dependent on the configuration, I was able to hobble together a patched version using the openLDAP directory from 9.3 and the configuration files from EPM 11.1.1.1 for windows (using the ldif files).

Update: This error is doesn't appear when using Oracle Linux 5.

I also saw errors for ORA-12519 in the config log ($HYPERION_HOME/logs), so based on some recommendations on the web I changed the numbers of processes and sessions. Then restarted:

-bash-3.00$ sqlplus sys/xxxx as sysdba
sqlplus > alter system set processes=200 scope=spfile;
sqlplus > alter system set sessions=225 scope=spfile;
-bash-3.00$ /etc/init.d/oracle-xd restart  

Restarted the configuration, this time it worked:

Now configured Essbase. Suprisingly Everything works!! Now on to testing the 64-bit version...