Developer edition licenses for older releases expired as shown in log at License version: 2013.0704 2011.1231 to get working license you need newer version for example ASE 15.7 installed in Developer editions and get license at SYSAM-20/licenses copied into older editions licenses folder.

1. Sybase Ase Developer's Edition Version 15.5

Recently I wanted to use Sybase ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise) on GNU/Linux to test some DDL (Data Definition Language) scripts I had written. I decided to put Sybase ASE on a system that is running 64-bit Fedora 13. In this post I will walk you through what you need to know in order to successfully install the product and get it operational on both 32-bit and 64-bit Fedora 13.

Sybase, like Oracle and other DBMSs, requires a separate user. Therefore create a new user named sybase whose home directory is /opt/sybase and who is a member of the default users group, i.e. sybase has no private group. I recommend that you put Sybase ASE at /opt/sybase as that is typically where such applications reside and that is the directory I use in this post.

• Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7 for Unix. Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7 for Windows. Installation Guide. The SAP Sybase ASE installation guide explains how to unload the software from the distribution media to the hard disk, and perform the minimal set of additional tasks so that SAP Sybase ASE can be started on the previously decided machine.
• Though Sybase ASE Developer Edition 15.5 has been deleted to the Trash, its lingering files, logs, caches and other miscellaneous contents may stay on the hard disk. For complete removal of Sybase ASE Developer Edition 15.5, you can manually detect and clean.

Before you start the actual install you need to check the current maximum size of a shared memory segment (part of System V IPC, see /usr/include/linux/shm.h for defaults) and increase it, if necessary, to 268435456 (256Mb).

You also need to ensure that the following packages are installed on your system:

If you are on 64-bit Fedora 13, you need to install some 32-bit libraries on your system before starting the installation. This is because the Sybase ASE installed which is called InstallAnywhere (setup.bin) is partially a Java application with JNI (native interface) dependencies on 32-bit system libraries. Since my system is 64-bit, I had to install the following 32-bit packages:

I used yum to install the above packages. Some other packages (libXau, libxcb, libX11, libXext and libXi were automatically installed by Yum to resolve dependencies. Interesting to note that some of the packages are marked fc12; guess they were never rebuilt for Fedora 13.

If you do not install the 32-bit libraries listed above, you will get the following error message when you try to run the Sybase ASE installer (which is named setup.bin).

The /lib/libc.so.6 is the giveaway. The path indicates that a 32-bit library is missing.

Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, create a temporary install directory anywhere you have sufficient capacity and download the Sybase ASE tarball to it. The tarball that I downloaded from Sybase was ase155_linuxx86-64.tgz. This is the current ASE Developers Edition for 64-bit GNU/Linux. If you are on a 32-bit platform, download the 32-bit version instead. If necessary change ownership and permissions so that sybase is the owner of this directory and all its contents and become the user sybase by whatever means suits you.

Ronnie wood gimme some neck rarity. Unless otherwise indicated, you should be logged in as sybase from here on out. As sybase, cd to the temporary install directory and untar the tarball that you downloaded. Interestingly, If you look at the resultant directory structure and files you will see that most of the Sybase tools are Java-based and Sybase ASE includes it’s own version of the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and many other common Java libraries.

The Sybase ASE installer can run in either console or graphics mode. Graphics mode is much easier to use in my opinion but if you are on a terminal or remotely connected you may prefer to use the console mode. Note that if you have not installed 32-bit X libraries listed above, you can only use the console mode. If you have these libraries installed and the installer still informs you that it cannot use the graphics mode via a message similar to this:

then you need to modify your X Server settings. The following command should fix the issue for you:

The xhost access control utility is used to add and delete host names or user names to the list of entities allowed to make connections to the X server. The above command adds a Server Interpreted entry of type localuser with a value of sybase. See the xhost and XSecurity man pages if your are unsure of the syntax.

If all goes well, here is what you should see when you invoke the installer by entering ./setup.bin

I suggest you select the defaults for all of the options presented to you. Ensure that the installation is to the /opt/sybase directory. The whole installation should take less than 10 minutes if you are on a reasonably fast system.

Assuming that the install is successful, you should modify the .bashrc for the user sybase so that it always sources the SYBASE.sh script which is now in the /opt/sybase directory. Add the following lines to the existing .bashrc script. This script sets up all the environmental variables and PATHs needed to administrate the Sybase ASE installation.

Otherwise you will have to manually source SYBASE.sh every time you log in. If you are using ksh93 modify .kshrc to include this file. There also is a SYBASE.csh script for csh and tcsh holdouts.

To determine whether the servers you installed are running, use the showserver shell script.

Unlike Oracle, the Adaptive Server runs as a single process (dataserver) within Fedora. Neither does it use any operating system threads as it has it’s own threading model.

The next step is to check whether you can connect to the Adaptive Server. A simple test is to use the isql utility to check what version of the Adaptive Server is running. My server was called ULTRA. Your server will be called something else so anywhere you see ULTRA used on the command line replace it with the actual name of your server.

If you were unable to connect, use netstat -na to check the Adaptive Server port (default is 5000) is in the LISTENING state. If you still cannot connect, check your IPTables and SELinux settings.

Note that no password for the Sybase system administrator (username sa) was required. This is because the initial value for the sa password is set to NULL.

To set the password for the system administrator:

where null is the default password and “NEWPASSWORD” is the password that you wish to assign to the sa account.

Sybase provides a modular (plugin) graphical user interface called Sybase Central which you can use to perform various administrative tasks. To invoke it, enter aseplugin at the shell prompt. If you get an error message about “No protocol specified” as is likely, you need to grant access to the X Server by means of the xhost command described earlier in this post.

Here is a screenshot of Sybase Central:

Adaptive Server uses logical devices to store physical data. Before you go another further, it is a good idea to create a new logical device so you do not fill up or otherwise damage the master device which contains the system tables and other critical data The term device does not necessarily refer to a distinct physical device such a disk; it can refer to a disk partition or an individual file. A logical device must be prepared and made known to Adaptive Server before it can be used. This process is called initialization.

Here I create two 64Mb file-based devices in /var/lib/sybase – one for the Adaptive Server (test.dat) and one for the Backup Server (test-bs.dat):

Another component of Sybase ASE is called an XP Server. This server is used with Extended Stored Procedures (ESP). For example, the system ESP xp_cmdshell enables you to issue an operating system command from within Adaptive Server. XP Server and the Adaptive Server run on the same system and communicate via remote procedure calls (RPC) but are different processes. The theory is that running ESPs in a separate process protects the Adaptive Server from a failure due to faulty ESP code.

Sybase Ase Developer's Edition Version 15.5

The XP Server is automatically installed when an Adaptive Server is installed. However, it does not start up when the Adaptive Server is started; instead the Adaptive Server starts the XP Server the first time an ESP is invoked and shuts down the XP Server as necessary when it exits.

If you want to use the xp_cmdshell ESP, you should probably just set xp_cmdshell context to 0, otherwise you will end up with “User access denied. Failed to change the user context.” messages when you try to use it. When xp_cmdshell context is 0, the permissions of the operating system account under which Adaptive Server (in my case, sybase) is running are the permissions used to execute an operating system command from xp_cmdshell.

As you can see from the above, xp_cmdshell date returned the current date.

Sybase ASE supports web services and comes with its own Jetty-based webserver. The web services consists of two components, a Web Services Producer and a Web Services Consumer. Both components run independently of the Adaptive Server. The Web Services Producer component enables client applications to access SQL and stored procedures in Adaptive Server using SOAP. The Web Services Consumer component enables Adaptive Server to access the Web services of other applications. You can start the Web Services using the runconsumer or runproducer scripts which are located in $SYBASE/WS-15_0/bin. Port 8181 is the default port.

Here is what you should see on that port if you invoke runproducer:

If you do not see a web page similar to this, then check your configuration to see if you specified a different port than 8181 for the Web Services.

If you want to automate the starting and stopping of your Sybase installation, here is an init script which can be added to /etc/init.d to handle these tasks.

This script expects to find a configuration file for the Sybase ASE installation at /etc/sybase/sybase.conf. Here is the contents of my sybase.conf:

The other file used by the Sybase init script is $SYBASE/stop.in. This file contains the isql statements required to shutdown the Adaptive Server and the Backup Server.

where “PASSWORD” is the sa password.

You can then use the service command to start, stop and check the status of the database.

If you are an experienced system administrator, you should not need any instructions on how to integrate this script into the correct run levels so that the Adaptive Server is started and stopped automatically when the system is booted up and shutdown. If you do need help, there are plenty of guides on how to do so available in many languages on the Internet. Note that this script does not handle any Web Services. If you are going to use the Web Services, you probably should modify the script to also handle the starting or stopping of the Web Services.

Two other servers come with Sybase ASE. They are not important from the perspective of an initial installation but I will briefly describe them for completeness. The Backup Server is a utility that handles all dumps and loads for the Adaptive Server. It is started automatically when the Adaptive Server is started but must be separately shutdown. The commands to do this are included in the stop.in file described above. The Monitor Server collects Adaptive Server performance data in real time and makes the data available to the other Sybase ASE tools which store the data, analyze it and produce reports.

Well, this is all that you should need to know to get Sybase ASE installed and working on Fedora 13. Good luck with your particular installation. Please let me know if I have missed any of the important steps and I will update this post.

P.S. Sybase generously makes many of their products freely available to developers for non-commercial use on GNU/Linux. Go here for more information and to download a developer edition of one or more of their products.