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Refactor Assistant

note

This guide assumes you have an IBM Cloud account that is accessible. It also assumes you have the ibmcloud cli installed and configured. The installation of ibmcloud cli can be found here.

Mileage may vary on different cloud providers.

Pre-Requisites​

  • Watsonx Code Assistant instance deployed in IBM Cloud
  • IBM® Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI)
  • IBM Application Discovery Connect for Mainframe (IBM AD Connect for Mainframe)

Hardware​

For this build, we will be deploying a Linux Virtual Server Instance in IBM Cloud. It require the following:

Refactor Host

  • OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8x/9x
  • RAM: 16G
  • Storage: 100G for local, 400G for data
  • Cores: 4

Software to be installed​

info

As of this writing, RA version 1.1.1 is available and can be downloaded from IBM Software Downloads

Refactoring Assistant

  • Podman
  • Refactor Containers

Refactor Host​

Creating the instance in IBM Cloud​

Install the ibmcloud plugin for infrastructure service

note to RK: Add the cli commands to create the instance here

note

When you create your RHEL instance, make sure you created it with your SSH key installed.

Make sure to add an external floating ip to your RHEL instance in IBM Cloud. This will allow us to SSH in using our SSH key.

Accessing the instance in IBM Cloud​

ibmcloud plugin install infrastructure-service

Our instance name for RHEL 9.x is called "wca4z-refactor"

Configure the data disk​

On our IBM Cloud VSI RHEL9 host, we aren't using anything fancy like LVM2. So we're going to just spin this out as a regular disk and hang it on.

  1. Find the disk
[root@wca4z-refactor ~]# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
vda    252:0    0  100G  0 disk
├─vda1 252:1    0    1M  0 part
├─vda2 252:2    0  200M  0 part /boot/efi
├─vda3 252:3    0  500M  0 part /boot
                                /
vdb    252:16   0  500G  0 disk
vdc    252:32   0  392K  0 disk
vdd    252:48   0   44K  0 disk

Create the primary partition on the new disk

note

This assumes the customer is using XFS as their filesystem for their RHEL host. Mileage may vary.

parted -s -a optimal /dev/vdb mklabel gpt 'mkpart primary xfs 1 -1'

mkfs.xfs /dev/vdb1

Create the necessary directory path. We want to mount all our podman storage on the data filesystem we just created

mkdir -p /var/lib/containers/storage

echo "/dev/vdb1	/var/lib/containers/storage xfs	defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

mount -a

You should now see the new filesystem mounted.

df -h

[root@wca4z-refactor containers]# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs           7.9G   84K  7.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.2G  351M  2.8G  11% /run
/dev/vda4       100G   11G   89G  11% /
/dev/vda3       495M  247M  249M  50% /boot
/dev/vda2       200M  7.0M  193M   4% /boot/efi
tmpfs           1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/0
/dev/vdb1       500G  5.6G  495G   2% /var/lib/containers/storage

Install pre-req packages​

sudo dnf -y install podman unzip wget java-11-openjdk.x86_64 httpd-tools

Enable podman and start it up.

sudo systemctl start podman
sudo systemctl enable podman

Retrieve and install the Refactor Assistant​

Go to IBM's internal download site and download IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z Refactoring Assistant 1.1.1 Linux Multilingual.

We are extracting this package to the root directory.

unzip IwCAfZRA_1.1.1_L_ML.zip
Archive:  ../IwCAfZRA_1.1.1_L_ML.zip
   creating: IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z Refactoring Assistant 1.1.1 Linux Multilingual/
 extracting: IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z Refactoring Assistant 1.1.1 Linux Multilingual/refactoring-assistant-1.1.1.zip

cd IBM\ watsonx\ Code\ Assistant\ for\ Z\ Refactoring\ Assistant\ 1.1.1\ Linux\ Multilingual/

unzip refactoring-assistant-1.1.1.zip
Archive:  refactoring-assistant-1.1.1.zip
  inflating: PRD0013118key.pem.cer
  inflating: PRD0013118key.pem.chain
  inflating: PRD0013118key.pem.pub.key
 extracting: WCA4Z-Data-Generator-1.1.2.zip
  inflating: WCA4Z-Data-Generator-1.1.2.zip.sig
  inflating: refactoring-assistant-1.1.1.tgz
  inflating: refactoring-assistant-1.1.1.tgz.sig

tar zxf refactoring-assistant-1.1.1.tgz

mv refactoring-assistant ~/
info

More installation info can be found here.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx-code-assistant-4z/1.0?topic=installing-setting-up

In your IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z Refactoring Assistant root directory, run the following command to install the IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z Refactoring Assistant container images.

cd ~/refactoring-assistant
./setup.sh

Copy the config/template.properties file to config/config.properties. Open config/config.properties in an editor and enter the values inside as instructed. You can refer to the following example:

Important values here are:

  • CERTS_LOCATION will be created if it doesn't exist when we run the start command. We are using /root/certs in our environment.
  • AD_HOST_PORT this is the ip or FQDN of the ADDI host.
  • ENVIRONMENT_ID can be obtained from the ADDI dashboard on the ADDI Host.

https://localhost:9443/ad/admin/configure?tab=environments ENV_ID

# *******************************************************************************
# Licensed Materials - Property of IBM
# © Copyright IBM Corporation 2022, 2023
#
# Note to U.S. Government Users Restricted Rights:
# Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule
# Contract with IBM Corp.
# *******************************************************************************

# Absolute path to directory where certificates and keys are kept
CERTS_LOCATION=/root/certs

# Protocol to use to communicate with AD services
PROTOCOL=https

# The IBM AD configuration (ZooKeeper) connection string, e.g. hostname.mydomain.com:2281 (use port 2181 if connection is unsecured)
AD_HOST_PORT=10.241.64.4:2281

# Ports of the AD mainframe projects and file services respectively
# AD_PROJ_PORT=7650
# AD_FILE_PORT=7700

# The environment ID, which can be obtained from the IBM Application Discovery Configuration Service Admin dashboard
# https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/addi/latest?topic=configuring-by-using-ad-configuration-service
ENVIRONMENT_ID=8a714d09-f67a-4891-8071-7d581959dbcc

# The location of the DEX authentication server, defaults to $PROTOCOL://$AD_HOST:7600 if unset
# DEX_HOST_PORT=

# Outbound mail settings to enable email notifications
# MAIL_HOST=
# MAIL_PORT=
# MAIL_USERNAME=
# MAIL_PASSWORD=

# Extra Java mail properties, which can be specified by using MAIL_PROPERTIES_ prefix
# followed by the property name with dot separators replaced by underscores
# MAIL_PROPERTIES_MAIL_SMTP_AUTH=true

Generate the TLS Certs for Refactor​

Generate the TLS certs that will be required for ADDI Host and Refactor host to talk to each other.

./start.sh --prepare-only /root/certs

This will generate a bunch of certs in that directory.

In the /root/certs directory, a self-signed certificate named root.crt is generated from the preparatory step. Copy this certificate to the IBM ADDI host where IBM AD Configuration Server is running, and import it into the truststore file that ADDI uses.

In our case it was just easier to create the root.crt file and copy the contents over.

now let's start things up

Start up Refactor​

./start.sh
info

Once the start command is run, you will be asked what image registry to download the orientdb container image from. We've selected the docker.io repo in this example.

Set the orientdb pass to inittest

Once things are happier, podman should show the following:

[root@wca4z-refactor refactoring-assistant]# podman ps -a
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                            COMMAND               CREATED             STATUS             PORTS                   NAMES
2e6843cce881  docker.io/library/orientdb:3.2.18                /orientdb/bin/ser...  About a minute ago  Up About a minute                          orientdb
bc5bbd4219b0  localhost/ibm/ra/ad-core-server:1.1.1                                  53 seconds ago      Up 52 seconds      0.0.0.0:4001->4001/tcp  ad-core-server
b9973f5940c4  localhost/ibm/ra/refactoring-assistant:1.1.1                           52 seconds ago      Up 50 seconds      0.0.0.0:8081->8081/tcp  refactoring-assistant
c9071da1e3b5  localhost/ibm/ra/refactoring-assistant-ui:1.1.1  /bin/sh -c nginx ...  50 seconds ago      Up 48 seconds      0.0.0.0:9443->9080/tcp  refactoring-assistant-ui

Let's set refactor as a systemd service. The service script will ask you for the orientdb password, which we set to inittest.

./install-as-service.sh

This will configure the services as a systemd service that will start on reboots.