I've got a pile of work to do with RSA coming up over the next six weeks. I'll be pretty much living and breathing the product in a project that will probably take me to Berlin, New York and London. It's an upgrade project so I thought I'd set up a sample environment and work through the process (yet again) as a bit of a practice. Any regular readers would know that I have fought with RSA 7.1 before. And I'm fighting it again today.

To set the scene, I've got a perfectly working RSA 6.1 installation in a virtual machine. It's a Master and I have a Replica configured too. It's all properly licensed and working as it should. The VM's are running Windows 2003 R2 with SP2 as per the support pages. They also have a measly 384Mb RAM and still work like a dream, but that is a point I've made previously.

I've increased my virtual machine memory to 2GB. As these VMs are in Fusion on my Mac I've not got the recommended 4GB to spare, so 2Gb will have to do.

The upgrade, apart from taking the usual AGE, looked to be going well. But then it died horribly:

Without the database, the product is unable to install properly. I can't find anything on Google regarding this error message. (Although I did like the sponsored link to the right of the page. If only!)

I guess this means the the answer is locked deep inside RSA's vaults. I'll wait for my renewed partner level access then. :-(

Interestingly enough, the log file shows a number of weird errors, including reference to BEA WebLogic. That explains why the Java web app is so slow and cumbersome! I'm not intending to rubbish WebLogic at all, but it is certainly overkill for something as simple (previously!) as RSA Authentication Manager. For instance, my website runs on a free product called Drupal which is fast, slick and can be run in way less memory than WebLogic. I still don't understand why RSA. I'd love to know what you were thinking.