Pre-Installation Requirements for the Multi-Tier "Enterprise" Edition Request Broker and Database Agent(s) for Informix, for Unix-like OS

DBMS Requirements

You need to know a variety of information pertaining to your target Informix DBMS instance and database:

Database Name
Informix Instance Name
Informix Instance Startup Mode (Sockets or Shared Memory). Note: Shared Memory connections with the Enterprise Edition require that the Request Broker and Database Agent be running on the Informix instance host. Sockets connections with the Enterprise Edition may be made with the Request Broker and Database Agent running on any host.
Informix Service Name
Informix TCP Port Number
Database Server Hostname or IP Address

The Multi-Tier server components must be installed on the same machine as an Informix native client, which may already be present as part of the Informix server installation. You can obtain the Informix Client SDK free of charge from the IBM Web site, and getting the latest version is recommended even if these components were already present
You must know whether the local Informix components are 32-bit or 64-bit. The Multi-Tier server components must match the bit format of the local Informix components, not the OS.

If you are installing install the Multi-Tier server components on the same machine as an Informix native client (not Informix itself), the client must be configured to connect to the remote Informix DBMS.
You must know whether TCP ports 5000 and 8000 are in use on the local Unix machine. These ports are the defaults used by our Request Broker and Web-based Admin Assistant. If other services are using these, you will need to assign different (unused) ports to these services during installation.
The local /etc/services file should include the Informix service definition; if not, the Informix socket service must be specified by port number, not name, in all our configuration, whether server-side or client-side.
It is best to install your Multi-Tier server components using the UID of the local Informix or Informix native client owner.
All Informix-related environment variables should be set prior to installation. This is typically accomplished simply by logging in as the local Informix or Informix native client owner, but if logged in as a different user, you can often achieve the same by using that user's .profile or similar, with a command like one of these (depending on your active shell) --
```
source ./.profile
. ./.profile
```