Update! After the first installation according this post I could connect to the director agent but it was only a regarded as a level 0 agent from the director server. When trying the core services there was of course lots of libraries missing. I don't doubt that I could get director running but what at price? What I really wanted was a simple way to monitor the server, especially the raid, for example using SNMP. Director isn't lightweight in any respect, it eats cpu cycles and mem, so i decided to skip and pursue another path. It wasn't worth the effort.

For those of you who wants to manage IBM's ServeRaid on Debian/Ubuntu may follow the guideMonitoring utility for IBM ServeRAID [1]. When it comes to monitoring I still have to find out what program to use. Perhaps Ipsmon is an option? Input is appreciated.

To install IBM Director on Debian Etch I took a detour over Suse Linux in order to get all correct. What I did was to install Suse Linux 10 Enterprise Server on a virtual machine and extract the necessary files from there. Before installing Director on Suse I made a copy of /usr and /etc using cp -rp. The copies ended up in /etc.bak and /usr.bak. Then I installed the director agent and core services version 5.10 update 3. After that I diffed the directories to find out what had been installed using:

diff -r /etc /etc.bak > etc.diff
diff -r /usr /usr.bak > usr.diff

Nothing had to be done for /usr as there were no changes. In /etc the following dirs where added:

/etc/ibm/director/twgagent/twgagent
/etc/init.d/twgagent
/etc/pam.d/ibmdir
/etc/profile.d/twgagent.sh
/etc/rc.d/twgagent
/etc/TWGagent/TWGagent

The rest of the Director files were installed in /opt/ibm. So I used tar to collect all files:

tar -rvpsf director.tar /opt/ibm
tar -rvpsf director.tar /etc/ibm
tar -rvpsf director.tar /etc/init.d/twgagent
tar -rvpsf director.tar /etc/pam.d/ibmdir
tar -rvpsf director.tar /etc/profile.d/twgagent.sh
tar -rvpsf director.tar /etc/rc.d/twgagent
tar -rvpsf director.tar /etc/TWGagent/TWGagent

When installing on Debian I just unpacked the files and then copied

etc/init.d/twgagent -> etc/init.d/ 
etc/ibm -> /etc/ 
etc/TWGagent -> /etc/ 
opt/ibm -> /ibm 

using cp -pr. I didn't try the other files, but /etc/pam.d/ibmdir is perhaps a good idea to use in case one wants to authenticate from a Director server.

I wasn't even trying the start script that was installed. Instead I created a new one:

#!/bin/sh
#
# twgagent: Starts the IBM Director Agent
#
# Version: 5.10.3
#

# Load ITDAgent defaults
. /etc/ibm/director/twgagent/twgagent

PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:${TWG_ROOTDIR}
export PATH

START_DAEMON=${TWG_ROOTDIR}/bin/twgagent
STOP_DAEMON=${TWG_ROOTDIR}/bin/twgend
DAEMON_STATUS=${TWG_ROOTDIR}/bin/twgstat

case "$1" in
  start)
    if [ -x ${START_DAEMON} ];
    then
      echo -n ' TWGAgent: '
      start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec ${START_DAEMON}
      #echo ${START_DAEMON}
      RETVAL=$?
      echo
      [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/twgagent
    fi
  ;;
  stop)
    if [ -x ${STOP_DAEMON} ];
    then
      echo -n ' TWGAgent: '
      start-stop-daemon --start --exec ${STOP_DAEMON}
      #echo ${STOP_DAEMON}
      RETVAL=$?
      echo
      [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/twgagent
    fi
  ;;
  status)
    if [ -x ${DAEMON_STATUS} ];
    then
      echo -n ' TWGAgent status: '
      start-stop-daemon --start --exec ${DAEMON_STATUS}
      echo ${DAEMON_STATUS}
    fi
  ;;

  *)
    echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|status}" >&2
    exit 1
  ;;
esac

exit 0

After that I could start, stop and check the status of the service. I haven't tried yet to connect to the agent from a director server.