Foiled Again - Installation of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence has failed. Return code : 1

So I hit this issue last year: -

Installation of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence has failed. Return code : 1

during the installation of an IBM Business Monitor 8.0.1.2 environment.

Then I was using Red Hat Enterprise Linuux 6 on VMware.

I blogged about it at the time: -

Installation of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence has failed. Return code : 1

This time around I've hit the same problem again, but using AIX 7.1 on IBM Power7.

Believe it or not, I'm almost the only person in the world who's ever hit this problem - or, to be more realistic, who's written about it :-)

It took me a fair amount of time to crack the problem. To start with, I tried installing the IBM Business Monitor stack one product at  a time; WAS 8.0.0.8, BAM 8.0.1.2 and then Cognos 10.1.1.

However, Cognos kept on failing with the same exception.

I dug around, and eventually found a log file that has some useful insight: -

/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/cognos/instlog/tl-BISRVR-10.1-6235.144-20140502_0341.txt

When I dug into this log file using grep to pull out all instances of the word fail, I saw this: -

Warning: Failed to get file list for directory "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/cognos/maps".
Warning: Failed to retrieve environment variable "LC_ALL".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docs8qckstrt-aix64h-gate-10.1.146.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/en/common/help_toolbar_bg.gif" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docs8qckstrt-aix64h-gate-10.1.146.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docmigmfdm-aix64h-gate-10.1.82.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/en/images/ug_mfdm_chkmrk.jpg" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docmigmfdm-aix64h-gate-10.1.82.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docdashboard-aix64h-gate-10.1.127.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/en/common/chkbx.gif" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docdashboard-aix64h-gate-10.1.127.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngde-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/de/images/tg_bitshoot_action_import_portlet.jpg" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngde-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngen-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/en/images/tg_bitshoot_action_import_portlet.jpg" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngen-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtnges-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/es/images/tg_bitshoot_action_import_portlet.jpg" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtnges-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngfr-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/fr/images/tg_bitshoot_action_import_portlet.jpg" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngfr-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "." from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngja-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".
Failed to extract file "webcontent/documentation/ja/images/tg_bitshoot_action_import_portlet.jpg" from tar file "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/CognosImage/zipfiles/aix64h/docbitrblshtngja-aix64h-gate-10.1.44.0-inst.tar.gz".

For me, there were two possible solutions: -

(1) I was running out of disk space

(2) There was an issue with the AIX tar command

I tried both solutions and, quelle surprise, I think disk space was the issue, even though I didn't see exceptions similar to the previous time e.g. Error: Call to mkdir() failed for directory "/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/cognos/war/gateway/lib/": No space left on device.

Still, once I increased the space available to /opt/IBM/WebSphere ( the file-system that hosts WAS, BAM, Cognos ) and did a clean uninstall / reinstall of the whole BAM stack, it just worked, which is nice :-)

Bottom line, for me, the exception has always been related to disk space issues :-)