Installing Blackboard on a hosted Amazon EC2 Instance

Linux/Oracle instructions

Setting up your Amazon server

1. This is what the homepage/Management Console for EC2 looks like. Note the Launch Instance button in the middle upper left. Select this button to fire up a new virtual server instance.

2. Select the Community AMIs tab, search for Oracle, and select the following instance: ami-67ea0a0e identified by oracle-corporation/database-ami/64-bit/oracle_11107_SE_SE1_64Bit-image.manifest.xml. Hit the Select button to the right to continue.

3. Accept the default values for the installation, and click the Continue button at the bottom.

4. Accept the default values, and click the Continue button.

5. A key pair is required to generate the .ppk file required to log in via SSH. Either select your existing key pair or create a new one. You will need one to SSH into your server later. Click the Continue button.

6. On the following page, you will either choose an existing Security Group or define a new one. If defining a new one, you will need to ensure that ports 80 (HTTP) and 22 (SSH) are open from the public internet to your server in order to connect to it. Click Continue.

7. Verify the options and click Launch to continue.

8. Click the link to view your instances back in the Management Console.

9. While your instance is "spinning up" you will see its status as "pending." Click the refresh button to be notified when this value changes to "running."

Logging in for the first time and configuring the database

1. Before logging in via SSH for the first time, you will need to generate a key from the keypair received when setting up your instance. Use this tutorial to use PuttyGen to do so. When using PuttyGen, click Conversions->Import, enter a passphrase (highly recommended), and click Save Private Key to get the .ppk file.

2. Grab the Public DNS entry for your server from the Management Console. It will show up in the bottom frame. This is essentially the URL to your server and also the hostname to connect to for other purposes.

3. In Putty (my favorite SSH client) enter this value as the host name to connect to. Then in the Connection->SSH->Auth screen choose the .ppk file generated in step 1 to connect.

4. Type root as the desired login name

5. Accept the license if you agree to the terms.

6. Now you will set up the Oracle database by following the screen prompts relating to installation directories and passwords.

7. Wait for the database to be created

8. If desired, enter the values to configure backup

Preparing the system to install Blackboard

1. Obtain the Java JDK installer from this site. Grab the download URL and use wget to obtain the installation jar or use SFTP or SCP to copy it from another server. The specific version used in this example is "Java SE Development Kit 6u18 for Linux x64, Multi-language"

2. Install the JDK to /usr/local/jdk by chmod-ing the file so that it can be executed and running the bin file.
>chmod 733 jdk.bin
>./jdk.bin
>Agree to the license terms by typing yes
>mv /tmp/jdk1.6.0_18/ /usr/local/jdk

3. You will also need one additional RPM for the product to run successfully. Download gdbm-1.8.0-26.2.1.i386.rpm (attached to this page)
>wget http://www.edugarage.com/download/attachments/50331866/gdbm-1.8.0-26.2.1.i386.rpm
>rpm -i gdbm-1.8.0-26.2.1.i386.rpm

4. In similar fashion, you will need to SFTP or use wget to move the Blackboard installation jar and license key to the server.

5. Modify the /etc/hosts file to give your local machine a domain suffix. In our example, we're using .bbdev.local. This change will only affect the application's communication with itself and not impact the URL used by web-based end-users to access the system.

6. Create the directories used to store the Blackboard data and log files. Ensure that these are owned by the oracle user.
>mkdir /u02/bb
>chown oracle:oinstall /u02/bb

7. Ensure that the database has the appropriate permissions to install successfully
>su - oracle
>sqlplus "/ as sysdba"
SQL>@$ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/rstrconn.sql
SQL>commit;
SQL>exit
>exit (returns you to the root user)

Installing Blackboard

1. Create the required bbuser account and group
>groupadd bbuser
>useradd bbuser -g bbuser

2. Create the Blackboard installation directory
>mkdir /usr/local/blackboard
>chown bbuser:bbuser /usr/local/blackboard

3. Run the Blackboard installer
>/usr/local/jdk/bin/java -jar /tmp/bb-as-linux-9.1.jar

4. Enter the configuration values

a. Accept the default installation directory of /usr/local/blackboard

b. Choose Full installation

c. Answer Y if you agree to the license agreement

d. Specify the location of the XML license file

e. Accept the default Java directory of /usr/local/jdk

f. Accept the default shared content directory settings

g. Specify bbdev.local as the Appserver domain (you specified this in step 5 in the previous section)

h. Enter BBLEARN as the database instance name (you specified this in step 6 of the database installation instructions above)

i. Specify the database passwords set during database installation/configuration above

j. Specify the database identifier for this installation (we use BBLEARN, but this was typically bb_bb60 in previous versions of Blackboard)

k. Specify /u02/bb as the Oracle data and index directory (important, sure these directories exist and are owned by the oracle user! You did this in step 6 of the previous section.)

l. Specify the collaboration server hostname and configuration information (used for the virtual chat and lecture hall feature)

m. Specify localhost as the SMTP server (IMPORTANT: sending e-mail from your Blackboard development server will not work until you point this to a working e-mail relay or turn on SMTP services on this app server). Here we enter localhost merely as a way to continue the installation. You can change this by modifying the Blackboard configuration at a later date.