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UNIX®, Linux, and macOS Pre-Installation

This page details the pre-installation steps for UNIX®, Linux, and macOS installations.

Before beginning, make sure you review the UNIX®, Linux, and macOS Installation Overview, including:

Step 1: Review Supported Platforms

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Step 2: Review Platform Specific Notes

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Step 3: Install a Web Server

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  • Install the Apache httpd web server. This web server supports auto-configuration during the installation process.

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Important:

InterSystems recommends using the Apache httpd web server because it can be automatically configured during the installation process. Make sure it is installed and running before beginning the installation process. In most cases, it is not necessary to manually configure the Apache web server.

Step 4: Configure Large and Huge Pages (AIX® and Linux)

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Step 5: Maximum User Processes Recommendations

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  • This step is primarily recommended for production systems or those that are expected to perform memory intensive processes.

  • Ensure that the maximum user processes is set high enough to allow all InterSystems IRIS processes for a given user, as well as other default processes, to run on the system.

Step 6: Determine Owners and Groups

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  • Determine or create the user account that you will identify as the owner of the instance.

  • Determine or create the group you will identify as group allowed to start and stop the instance.

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  • If your operating systems contains the useradd and groupadd utilities (or mkgroup and mkuser on AIX®), you can instead create accounts for the effective user for InterSystems IRIS superserver and the effective group for InterSystems IRIS processes during the installation.

  • If your operating system uses Network Information Services (NIS) or another form of network-based user/group database, it may be best to create the InterSystems IRIS effective user and effective group in your network database prior to installing. For details, see Owners and Groups.

  • Review Owners and Groups.

  • Review UNIX® User and Group Identifications.

Important:

InterSystems IRIS must set user, group, and other permissions on files that it installs. To accomplish this, InterSystems IRIS sets umask to 022 for the installation process - do not modify the umask until the installation is complete.

Step 7: Set Swappiness (Linux)

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  • This step is primarily recommended for production systems or those that are expected to perform memory intensive processes.

  • For systems with less than 64GB of RAM: a swappiness of 5 is recommended.

  • For systems with more than 64GB of RAM: a swappiness of 1 is recommended.

  • The swappiness value determines how frequently your system will swap memory pages between the physical RAM and swap space.

Step 8: Install the VS Code ObjectScript Development Environment (Linux and macOS)

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Step 9: Acquire an InterSystems IRIS Kit

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Step 10: Uncompress the Installation Kit

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  • If your installation kit is in the form of a .tar file, for example iris-2019.3.0.710.0–lnxrhx64.tar.gz, you should uncompress the file into a temporary directory to avoid permissions issues. See the example provided below.

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  • The installation files uncompress into a directory with the same name as the .tar file, for example /tmp/iriskit/iris-2019.3.0.710.0–lnxrhx64.

  • Because legacy tar commands may fail silently if they encounter long pathnames, InterSystems recommends that you use GNU tar to untar this file. To determine if your tar command is a GNU tar, run tar --version.

Example:

# mkdir /tmp/iriskit 
# chmod og+rx /tmp/iriskit 
# umask 022 
# gunzip -c /download/iris-<version_number>-lnxrhx64.tar.gz | ( cd /tmp/iriskit ; tar xf - )

Important:

Do not uncompress the file into or run InterSystems IRIS installation from the /home directory, or any of its subdirectories. Additionally, the pathname of the temporary directory cannot contain spaces.

Do not install InterSystems IRIS into the same directory you used to uncompress the installation kit.

Step 11: Install the Required Dependencies

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  • Run the requirements checker using the following command:

    /<install-files-dir>/irisinstall --prechecker
    
    Note:

    You must have the permissions necessary to run the command to execute the requirements checker:

    AIX®: lslpp

    Red Hat Linux and SUSE: rpm

    Ubuntu: dpkg

  • Install any missing dependencies and ensure the user performing the installation can access all necessary dependencies.

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  • If you try to install InterSystems IRIS with missing dependencies, the installation will fail with an error in messages.log like the following: Error: OS Package Requirements Check Failed.

  • The requirements checker always runs during instance startup. The startup fails if the requirements are not met.

Step 12: Choose Your Installation Strategy

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