How to Debug an Identity Manager Installation

Products

• CA Directory
• CA Identity Manager
• CA Identity Governance
• CA Identity Portal

Issue/Introduction

If the installation of Identity Manager fails, you can debug the install (InstallAnywhere). This is for a standalone installation only, not Virtual Appliance

 

Environment

Release:
Component: IDMGR

Resolution

Debugging a Win32 installer

To view or capture the debug output from a Win32 installer, hold down the <CTRL> key immediately after launching the installer and until a console window appears. Before exiting the installer, copy the console output to a text file for later review.

On some Windows NT systems, run the installer once with the <CTRL> key down, resetting the scroll back buffer for the console window, then quit and run the installation again.

If there are problems capturing the console output, try a slightly more convoluted method (this will often be the case on Win9x because of the limited ability of the console to capture output). First launch the installer and allow it to extract the necessary files. Once it reaches the "Preparing to Install..." window, when given the opportunity to choose a language or to go to the Windows "temp" directory, look for a temp folder which starts with an 'I" followed by many numeric digits (ex. I1063988642). Be sure it is the most recent directory, by sorting the directories by their "modified" date. Open the directory, there should be a file called "sea_loc". Delete this file. Now go back to the installer, click OK, and at the first opportunity, cancel the installation.

Now go back to the directory inside the temp directory, where the file "sea_loc" was deleted. There should be another directory called "Windows"; open it. There should be an .exe file (most likely "install.exe"). There should also be another file with the same name except it will have a .lax extension. Open it with a plain text editor and edit the lines:

lax.stderr.redirect= AND lax.stdout.redirect= to be:

lax.stderr.redirect=output.txt AND lax.stdout.redirect=output.txt

After these changes have been made, save the file and launch the .exe. When the installation is complete there should be an output.txt file in the same directory as the .lax file. The output.txt file will contain the same information as that generated to the console.

Debugging a Unix/Linux installer

To capture the debug output from the Unix command line developers need to perform the following: enter one of the following (based on which shell) at the command line prior to executing the installer:

export LAX_DEBUG=true or setenv LAX_DEBUG true or LAX_DEBUG=true or set LAX_DEBUG or whatever would be appropriate for the Unix shell.

Then run the installer. The output that is produced should help debug the installer.

When running this for support, you will need to output the debug to a log to attach to a support case, Follow these steps:

1. Set LAX_DEBUG=file as per the instruction above. 
2. Run your installer. 
3. Once the install is complete a file labeled jx.log will be generated in the same directory as your installer. This file will contain the entire debug output generated by the install.

Debugging a Mac OS X Installer:

InstallAnywhere utilizes the standard output layers in Mac OS X to display output. To gather debugging output from an OS X installer, launch console.app. This output is found in /Applications/Utilities. To retain this information, cut and paste information from the console window to a file.

Debugging a Provisioning components installer (IMPD / IMPS / IMPM / CS etc) which uses InstallShield - same method for all OS types:

Navigate to the location of the installer and run it using the proper account (Administrator for Windows)

setup.exe -log @ALL

This will result in additional logging information in imps_directory_install.log.