Installing as root on Linux

When installing WAS on a UNIX-like platform, Linux, you should install using the root user or appropriate sudo access. After the installation is complete, the ownership of the installation binaries should be changed to an appropriate non-root user.

It is often company policy for production environments not to allow products such as WAS as the Linux root user for reasons, such as security and the configurability of shell environment variables and shell profiles. Another very good reason to use a non-root user is that you can apply settings to the Linux profile for the user account assigned to WAS, thus segregating WAS or application-specific settings away from other systems, which may also be running on the same machine.

While learning WAS and to keep things simple, without getting sidetracked by security and folder permission errors, it is recommended that you install and run WAS instances as the root user on Linux. Using root will ensure WAS installations will work with all the third-party products that we will install throughout this book.

Filesystem preparation for Linux

Before running the WAS installation, we need to check the umask. The umask setting controls the permissions that will be masked (not set) for any newly created files, for example, 022. By using the Linux command umask, we can check the current umask. It needs to be set to 022. We can set this by typing the following command in a secure shell:

umask 022

Using the umask command ensures that all new files will be set with the 8-bit inverse permission of 755.