DB2 Express C 9.5 is now available on OS X. As a result OS X developers do not need to use a virtual machine any longer to be able to run DB2 in their favorite development environment. And what more, the latest version available for download also works on Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Installation Steps

Antonio Cangiano (see below) has created very good step by step instructions, as well as a demo of the install process. Here are a couple of issues one might encounter:

• I recommend setting up a separate DB2 user to own the db2 install, for example db2inst1
• After the install or the first start, DB2 might freeze, and prevent any connections. You might need to kill the db2* processes and start DB2 again.
• Remember to source the environment required to run DB2 command line tools:
. sqllib/db2profile
• Profile can be loaded automatically by adding the above line to .bash_profile in your home directory
• Allow all admin users to access the DB2 instance:
db2 update dbm cfg using sysadm_group Admin
• When trying db2fs, it will crash on Firefox 3, the easiest fix is to download and old version of Firefox, and give the path to that version when prompted by db2fs
• Make sure TCP/IP service in correctly configured in /etc/services and in DB2:
db2 update dbm cfg using SVCENAME db2c_db2inst1
db2set DB2COMM=tcpip
• Add catalog entries for your remote databases:
db2 catalog tcpip node DBNAME remote db2box.domain.com server 5000X

References

• Install DB2 on Mac OS X and give us feedback by Antonio Cangiano
• DB2 Express-C Now Available on Mac OS X by Chris Eaton
• Screencast on how to install DB2 Express-C on Mac OS X by Antonio Cangiano
• DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard by Antonio Cangiano

How to view folders from the Mac that hosts the VMWare Fusion guest operating system CentOS or Red Hat Linux?

Solution

• First, make sure that the VMWare Tools are installed. That always helps.
• Next, in the WMWare configuration menu of the guest, set up the desired shared folders. There might be already a default shared folder pointing to the user’s home directory.
• Next, in the guest OS, ls -ld /mnt/hgfs will display the available shared folders.

References

[CentOS-virt] CentOS 5.1 guide for VMware Fusion

On Max OS X, when trying to connect to an OpenVPN gateway, you may encounter the following error:
2010-01-21 05:14:59 write UDPv4: Can't assign requested address (code=49)
2010-01-21 05:15:01 write UDPv4: Can't assign requested address (code=49)
...

The error would repeat itself indefinitely.

Root Cause

The TCP stack of the Mac has a bug that can cause the routing table to get corrupted.

Solution

The routing table needs to be flushed on the interface used to connect to the Internet. Typically,

• en0: ethernet (wired) interface
• en1: wlan (wireless) interface

The easiest way is to flush the routes is to reboot. The elegant way however is to shut down the interface connecting the Mac to the Internet, flush the routing table, and bring the interface back up. For example, assuming a wired connection, open a terminal or an X11 xterm window and issue the following commands:
sudo ifconfig en0 down
sudo route flush
sudo ifconfig en0 up

In case the command line hangs after the flush command, just open a new terminal and run the last command from there. When you are done, you can close all terminals. If you are connecting with wireless, replace en0 with en1.

References

OpenVPN error: write UDPv4: Can’t assign requested address (code=49)

Snow Leopard comes with a native 64 bit Java 1.6 environment. The Open MQ binaries are made for the JDK 1.5 in 32 bit. This article shows how to make Open MQ work on OS X 1.6 by compiling from source.

Steps

• Set environment
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
export ANT_HOME=$HOME/apache-ant-1.7.1
export ANT_OPTS=-Xmx512m
export IMQ_HOME=$HOME/mq/dist/mq
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$IMQ_HOME/lib/jms.jar:$IMQ_HOME/lib/imq.jar

• Download and unpack ant in your home directory
• Download and uppack OpenMQ 4.4 source in your home directory
• Create extlib:
mkdir ~/mq/extlib
• Download the Java EE 5 API into extlib:

  http://download.java.net/maven/1/javaee/jars/javaee-api-5.jar

• Compile Open MQ:
cd ~/mq
ant
• Test Open MQ:
cd dist/mq/bin
./imqbrokerd -tty &
cd ../examples/helloworld/helloworldmessage
java HelloWorldMessage
You should see
Sending Message: Hello World
Read Message: Hello World
And some debug messages on the imqbrokerd console.

References

• Open MQ Compilation Guide