Informix

Hi Joel,

you didn't state it, but it seems you're talking about IDS on Windows, right?

Also, you mentioned upgrade, but not whether this occurs on a machine that already had IDS installed (and therefor at least an informix user)?

Why all this matters?  First of all, on Windows you get to choose between local and domain installation, with implications on whether plain (local) user informix or domain\informix is used / gets created (same for ifxjson user) which could both co-exist and with differing passwords; and later on it determines whether users will be authenticated by an instance locally or in the domain.

You mentioned "local Informix and ifxjson user", so I'm assuming local installation.  Are you sure this is what you wanted? Or should domain users be able to connect?  And could your conflict come from an already existing domain\informix user?

For the first question, yes, those users will be used in services, along with their passwords, and if a password gets renewed it also needs to be updated in the respective service  (or you choose to have the service running under the system account).

Now not having a service, for the instance you're just about to create using instance manager, seems logical as you're not able to run the instance manager to completion because of this pw problem, doesn't it?  You shouldn't try and create the service manually, also since there's more to creating an instance, esp. a number of registry entries.

Thus far very quickly ... HTH,
 Andreas

I don't see a reply button for you Andreas, so I'm doing the "Answer".  Thank you Andreas for your response.  I'll try to address your questions. Because it's not a reply, hope you see it.

Yes, this is IDS on Windows. We are updating our platforms.  But that is on an older machine. This is a newly configured 2019 server. Meant to install Informix and test on.  This is not an upgrade. It didn't have Informix on it before.  But, I have installed it and removed it several times to choose the right options to get what I wanted. AND capture the screens for documentation.

Before installing, I removed both the CSDK and IDS.  And even though I requested a complete uninstall, it left behind directories, which I moved to a completely different directory (in case I needed something).  Then I removed the informix and ifxjson users as well as the groups (Informix-Admin and Informix-JSON) it created.

I did choose Local users.  AND, I clicked the DR box (even though we aren't doing replication) because apparently it doesn't create the informix user if I don't.  Only the ifxjson user.  I what I checked, because I have screen caps.  

For normal use, this is using FourJs.  Everything is running on this server.  We don't need domain users. Local is fine. We have the SSH setting up temp users - also locally. And because we have other servers, I'd rather not have a password get changed and, as you described, have to go mess with all of the services.  This machine is separate, so don't want it affected by domain changes.

Although I did check local users, how I find them is in the Active Directory Users and Computers program.  Listed with the computer name\informix as if it's domain name.

Also I am doing this as administrator.  I have not added either of the Informix groups it added to the administrator user.  I thought administrator was allowed regardless.

I look now, I see that my old 11.70 instances have the _dat added to dbspaces as well.  But like I said, that's not a big deal.  When I install a regular instance (and clients will probably only have one) and tell it the data space is called user1, it doesn't add the _dat. But when I tell the instance installer that it's user1, it does.

Exploring the Informix Multiresidency documentation.  Wondering if there's command line options to do all this and if it behaves differently from the GUI.

Wondering.  Seems that I can run the installer with the -f <ini_file>.  And that I can supply a few options, but not everything and it'll take defaults from the ini file. I'm not certain, but google AI generated a sample and from it I glean it could look like this:

[Installation]

INFORMIX_USER=<machine name>\informix

INFORMIX_PASSWORD=<my informix password>

So if just plain informix is the problem, I can use this to specify the machine name\informix as the user and specify the password.  The -f option for instmgr.exe apparently tells it to get some things from the ini file, then prompts the user for the rest.

I think I've got it.

I first tried the ini file and it didn't help.  Same problem.  I don't know if the format was wrong or it just didn't work.  I'd still like to know how the ini file is supposed to look, should I want to have the instance install all scripted and just run instmgr.exe using the ini file instead of going through the GUI.  But like I said, the clients don't have anything but the one default instance.  We had two clients on one machine once, but my predecessors set them each up with a different database within the same instance. Thinking now that it should've been 2 instances so that each client had their own resources like cache, tempdbs, and the data storage.  And if we ever have to do that again, that's the way I'd want to set it up.

But like I say, this didn't work.  I had the ini file with the INFORMIX_USER set to the current machine name\informix and the INFORMIX_PASSWORD set to it's password.

Then I ran instmgr.exe with the -system option.  Which the documentations says is : Create database server instance that runs as local system user instead of user informix. The database server must be installed as local system user to use this option.  There were no prompts for passwords.  Just installed everything. No errors.  Only the prompt popping up asking if I wanted to initialize the instance, which I did.  And the rootdbs has size now instead of being 0. Did a dbaccess and it seems to work.

All of the services were created, but not enabled however.  I had to change all of them to startup Type: "Automatic".  They are running now.  This has all of the oninits running as the SYSTEM account. Set my environment and ran dbaccess and they seem to work. I am about to set up some data spaces and load databases into each.

The default instance that got set up when I ran the IDS install (ol_informix1410) was set up the same way, running the oninit as user SYSTEM.

They are all running as user informix on the old machine.Not sure if I should care about the difference.  The default ol_informix1410 instance that the IDS install created is running as SYSTEM. If it's good enough for ol_informix1410 to run as SYSTEM, I'm assuming it should be good enough for my dev, test, and demo instances as well.

On the Log on tab of the service there are two "Log on as:" options, "Local System account" or "This account" where you key in a user and its password.  "Local System account" was selected on the one the IDS installed and is selected on these other instances.  OR, I can select the other option: "This account" where I key/browse for an account and key the password and confirm it. And get it running as informix.

On the old machine, they are set up as "This account" with ".\informix" as the account, and the password entered.  I assume I could do this too. I don't know what the difference would be.

I'm going to start off with this and see.  If need be, I can change it to Informix in the services tool and hope informix has the authority to read/write the db spaces.

Going to create dbspaces for the data now and load up some databases and see how well it works.