Taking Notez – Island Pond Consulting

This week I assisted a customer seeking to deploy IBM WebSphere Portal 7. The effort required exclusive use of the command line. All went well until time to apply WebSphere Application Server Fixpack 13. In order to apply the fix pack the update installer needs to be installed. This was version 19 of the installer (for RHEL) and a provided response file must be edited. One of the members of the file showed an odd syntax, a – followed by a space and then a property name. All of the other members were prefaced by a – followed by a key such as W or OPT. When the command was run, the task failed and referred to an empty string as an invalid value. By inference the team deduced the error was rooted in the odd syntax found in the response file. After inserting a W immediately after the – the silent install of the update installer proceeded as expected.