Saturday, March 27, 2010

Installation of Cognos Express (After uninstalling TM1)

Last night until the end of business day today, I was struggling to install IBM Cognos Express Xcelerator module onto my machine, it is like a mission to get it working.

One thing you need to know is that I had IBM Cognos TM1 already installed on my machine, and by design of IBM Cognos Express, you may not install both TM1 and Xcelerator or 2 Xceleartors on the same machine, I believe it is because of versioning issues as well as licencing issues.

So, what have I learnt from this, you cannot have both TM1 and Xcelerator installed on the same machine, if you uninstall TM1, for some reason, not 100% uninstalled, leaving some rubbish sitting in the registry, then oops, Xcelerator will not be able to install, when you try to install Xcelerator or Advisor, you will get the following error message code : MOD-ERR-001, that means that you have another version of TM1 installed on your machine, and the recommendation is to uninstall TM1 and retry, however, I have uninstalled, what else must I do to fix?
is
There are a few places to look for:
1. The Windows Services (You might notice Admin Server and Planning Sample are still there, TM1 did not remove them for some reason)
2. Cognos\TM1\bin folder still exists.

So what I did to take them all out is to dig into the registry, and find the Key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services, then find any thing with TM1, delete them, someone may say why can't I se sc -delete command in DOS? Well, it is not accepting, so I need to go through the back door.

After I deleted, and restarted the machine, not sure whether it is necessary, but doesn't bother me, after restarted and re-install Xcelerator, guess what is the error I am getting next?

SDK-ERR-0064 Installation of Xcelerator failed: Exit value = 1603

Eish, what is going on with this error? I have no idea how to handle that, so I googled a little, came back saying .Net Framework is not up to date, but I am quite a Microsoft geek as well, my .Net Framework is the most up to date version, then another thread, saying my machine need to be in English, and my machine is English, the most promising one is there are values left in registry from the previous installation that did not clear out properly, so I need to remove all of them before I can start over.

At last, I have contacted IBM Support Engineer, and he helped me through that, actually we played with that the whole business day, just to figure out what do I need to do to install Xcelerator, then I realised I need to do a lot more things to clean up.

1. Delete the original directory, IBM\Cognos Express directory.
2. There is a hidden folder under C:\, called Zero G Registry, you need to remove that, since this will keep the history of the installation.
3. Then we play with the registry, find everything in the registry that has
{D0E95515-AFE7-4636-A40D-B18D57213E65}, delete the parent and the key.

What a mission, hey? And they were not documented anywhere. After removed everything, then I tried to reinstall Cognos Express again, now, what do I get?

com.cognos.accman.jcam.crypto.CAMCryptoException : CAM-CRP-1346

Oh, my God, what is this now? It seems like it is trying to match the keys of the installation to let it successfully installed, and why am I seeing that? Because I still have the old key in my cache and I need to clean it first.

So, therefore, I reboot the system, reinstall AGAIN, probably the 20th time already since the first installation, finally, I am seeing Xcelerator successfully installed.

What a MISSION..........

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Tat's Solutions Blog Launch

Well, this is not the first time I am writing blog, but with my blog named in such a geeeeeeeeek way, this is really the first time, so, from the name of this blog, it will mainly consist of technical articles.

It's been a while I was thinking setting up a blog to share my knowledge or skills to people, also allow me to practice my English a little bit, I am actually quite weak in English thou, especially comes to explanation and documentations, I spent 2 minutes to develop something out, but takes me almost half a day to draft out a documentation to explain what I was doing in the past 2 minutes, so, writing a blog may be a good way for me to learn how to explain.

So, whoever reading my blog, PLEASE EXCUSE MY ENGLISH, and hopefully, can get someone to subscribe me in the future.