Business Objects on Linux Part 4

I’m thinking that this will be the last part in this series for a while. I may certainly revisit the topic of SAP Business Objects XI on Linux, but for now, I think we’ll put a bow on it. I don’t know why but this post kind of makes me smile. We are going to crack open a big can of Windows Active Directory (AD) goodness. Hopefully by now, you’ve been through Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series. I hope good things have come of it for you. The topic I have been inspired to cover today is handling Active Directory authentication on XI 3.1 via LDAP. Score.

Business Objects on Linux – MySQL Tweak

My new twitterverse pal Greg Myers (@gpmyers) was giving the first part of this series a go on Oracle Enterprise Linux yet still demanding support. I tell ya…users! Just kidding @gpmyers. Anyway, he came up with an interesting problem. First off, the XI 3.1 installer for Linux didn’t seem to like the reference to localhost on the screen where the MySQL parameter for hostname was supplied. I think we decided that this was because of his hosts file. But that isn’t the point of this post. He actually installed MySQL stand alone to see if he could work around this issue and it didn’t work either. The great news is he was already well on his way to the solution when we caught up. Read on…

Business Objects on Linux Part 3

We’ve already made some awesome progress on our CentOS 5.4 environment running SAP Business Objects XI 3.1. First, we constructed an enviroment and laid down the base install, and immediately followed that up by learning how to control services via the command line as well as pointing our CMS to use a new Oracle database. This post is going to dabble briefly in architecture strategy, then jumping head first into the technical stuff again.

If you are reading this, you are probably on the admin/architecture side of your BI team. If you aren’t already thinking it, you should be hating the fact right now that in our little test, the web tier lives on the same server as BOBJ. Using the magic of VMware, we are totally going to fix that so we have a distributed architecture for our test.

Business Objects on Linux – Step by Step

Note: Updated May 11, 2010 with a new step in the prerequisites section of this blog post.

I have come to the realization that I somehow got on a philosophical kick lately, as reflected in my last several blog posts. It’s time to get techno-nerd again.

A couple of recent questions on BOB inspired me to talk about Linux. And more importantly, installing SAP Business Objects on FREE versions of Linux. Before I ever had a chance to deploy SAP Business Objects on Redhat I really really wanted to try to do it on something that wasn’t going to cost me anything. Knowing CentOS for being effectively a free branch of the Redhat code base, I decided to start there for compatibility purposes. Let’s face it. Linux is an open source platform. The folks at CentOS picked up that code base, and did a giant find and replace on “Redhat” to “CentOS”. OK…maybe a tad bit underestimated, but we will start with that.