Ed’s Content Matters

Everything here represents my personal opinion unless clearly stated otherwise.
This blog is maintained on my personal time for personal reasons.

Building a new EMC Documentum Developer Edition from scratch. Off course latest and greatest version: 6.5sp2. Started as usual with a Windows 2003 server image with pre-installed tools (Notepad++, WinMerge, Office etc.). Updated with all new MS patches.

First gotcha:

Logon with the account you’ll be running your server with. Preferable not Administrator!

Immediately followed by the second gotcha:

Change the computer name to something unique.

Starting with the same base image results in multiple VMware images using the same computer name in the same network. That does not work.

Next a first tip:

Change the IP address to a fixed address.

Since the starting Windows 2003 server image uses DHCP to always get a free IP address, this needs to be fixed now. Changing the dynamically received IP address into a fixed address has proven to be successful so far.
Having a fixed address saves a lot of headaches afterwards when logging on over an RDP session.

Next double-checked the required software. Is Java installed? Is the .Net framework (version 2+) installed? They should be and are, but it has become a habit.

Next gotcha:

Make sure there are no spaces in the folder that contains the installer

Don’t know why EMC included this restriction in a Windows-only installer but they did.

Time to start the installer documentumSetup.exe. It will ask you for the password of your current account and allows you to specify some custom options or run with all password values in default.

Second tip:

Always go for a custom set of password values.

This allows you to specify custom passwords for many things. Most likely you will never need them.
But if you do, now you know them   Although this is not backed with evidence, there is that generic fear that someday you need it.

About 15 minutes later you’ve installed a developer Content Server, WebTop, DA, Retention Policy Services Admin. And of course, Composer is there as well.

Before doing anything else it is time for disaster prevention: shut-down and backup the image. Since reproducing this image is a matter of minutes rather than days, one zip file stored on the server and one on backup storage will do.
Only when this has been completed successfully, next steps like installing WebPublisher or DAM, can be started.

But before we do, we bookmark two additional URL’s that are part of a default Developer Edition Install.
JBoss comes with an administration console at http://localhost:9080/web-console/ and a JMX management console at http://localhost:9080/jmx-console/.  They both use the default ‘admin’ user to gain access. The password is a little bit more tricky…

A final gotcha:

If you changed the password according to my second tip, the admin password for JBoss is that password.

If you did not use custom passwords, the password is the one documented in the installation guide.