One of the great things about IBM software is that it is not only incredibly difficult to install successfully, but it's also incredibly difficult to troubleshoot when an installation doesn't go according to plan. Here's a quick tip that just might save you from going with a better, less expensive, open source product the next time an installation of an IBM product fails.

Installation problems and vpd.properties

*Corrected the name of the file as per comment below. Thanks. Edited by: Cameron McKenzie on Jun 17, 2011 9:59 AM

Really, to fix IBM installation problems is quite easy:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /opt/IBM

# Inspired from http://j.mp/lUbSJj

The correct name is "vpd.properties", not "vdp.properties" as written in the title.

(This reminds me of the times (about 10 years back) when I was working on a catalog management product for a (German) company - one of the features was volume discounts, and we (naively) named the "standard volume discount" file "std-vd.xml". It took us a while to find out why our American customers were a bit irritated by this...)

Well I cant agree more. Installing IBM products is my worst nightmare come true. It wud be good if this vdp.properties can solve some of those.

A question on a tangent - why would anyone want to use these (now obsolete?) Java based portal technologies these days? JSR 286, WSRP are 2003-2004 technologies with their roots in J2EE 1.3 - does anyone start a new portal project with these technologies these days? What happened to mashup servers? What other alternatives do you see people using? <Insert your favorite Javascript/AJAX toolkit here?>