The Big Kahuna, Installing WebSphere Portal 6.1 on CentOS 5.2

One of the contributing factors to my purchase of the server and the selection of CentOS was to allow me to install a test WebSphere Portal 6.1 instance to play around on.  I am happy to report a relatively painless installation.

I downloaded portal from IBM’s PartnerWorld.  It consisted of 7 cd ISO’s which I burned to disk.  My first attempt to install was with the GUI Wizard that ships with the product.  For whatever reason, the wizard would not run. Since I wanted a working portal and didn’t really care about a working wizard I switched to a command line installation without wasting anytime troubleshooting the wizard.  Besides, all the cool kids use the command line anyways.  I don’t recall how the long the installation took, but it was completely uneventful.

The thing that caused me the most annoyance with the whole install was getting the plugin for Apache to work so I wouldn’t have to go through the portal http/https ports.  The App Server documentation indicated that their is a plugin for Apache 2.2, but finding the executable was damn near impossible.  I knew from the documentation and various web posts that the name of the file was mod_was_app22_http.so.  Again, I usually don’t do much administrative work at the App Server level but I found the IBM jungle impenetrable.

After much searching I did finally find the download that was the AppServers “Extras” upgrade.  At the time I didn’t think to save the link, but incase anyone searching for mod_was_app22_http.so ends up here; I found in the download file: 6.1.0-WS-PLG-LinuxX64-FP0000021.pak.