Re: Multiple INFORMIXDIR

Five Cats wrote: > Neil Truby <neil.truby@ardenta.com> writes: >> "Brice Avila" <briceavila@hotmail.com> wrote: >>> Yes. I've seen testing servers that had many $INFORMIXDIR directories, >>> ... along with multiple $ORACLE_HOME directories. This is also OK with >>> Informix support. Hope this information helps. >> >> Indeed, I have some sites where we do this in production. This is >> necessary where application considerations dictate that an older >> version of IDS must be used. In one example, the customer has >> deployed an elderly version of Business Objects which requires a >> v7 repository, whilst the rest of the estate is v9. > > I found that V7 of IDS put some links in /usr/bin (or similar) back to > $INFORMIXDIR - I believe there is a work-around for this to allow > multiple versions but can't remember what it is. IDS 7 creates some symlinks from /usr/lib to the most recently installed $INFORMIXDIR; so too do IDS versions 9.x up to but not including 9.40. The names in /usr/lib have a format such as iosm07a.so, and the suffix letter (a in the example) identifies different shared library versions. If you have (for sake of example - I've not checked with the actual versions) 7.31.UC1 and 7.31.UD7 on the machine, then one of two possibilities applies: * They use the same version of the library, so it does not matter whether the UC1 executables use the UC1 or UD7 library since they're the same, or * They use different versions of the library, so the suffix letter is different and they are each insulated from the other. The only times this runs into trouble are (1) if you remove UD7 so the symlink points to a now non-existent $INFORMIXDIR, or (2) we goof and the libraries are given the same name but are not compatible after all. In (1), you can restore the symlink so it points to the still installed UC1 library. In (2), you can report the bug to IBM Informix and get the new version. If (2) arises, we would hear about it quickly - very quickly. -- Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h> Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com Guardian of DBD::Informix v2003.04 -- http://dbi.perl.org/