Today I needed to script the installation of IBM System i Access for Windows (formerly called IBM Client Access).

With older versions of this client (up to 5.4) you could use the -r (record) installer switch to record the install in a setup.iss file but version 6.1 uses an MSI based installer.

IBM offers the client in a 2 DVD download but you probably only need the first dvd (dvd 1 has both the x86 and x64 installers, dvd 2 has the ia64 installer) which is a whopping 3,5 GB download.

Inside the download (a zip) is an iso file of which you will only need the files in the root and the Image32 or Image64a folder.

Inside the image folder are subfolders names MRI29xx where xx is a language identifier:

The following Identifiers are used:

MRI2912 – Croatian
MRI2922 – Portuguese
MRI2923 – Dutch Netherlands
MRI2924 – English
MRI2925 – Finnish
MRI2926 – Danish
MRI2928 – French
MRI2929 – German
MRI2930 – Japanese
MRI2931 – Spanish
MRI2932 – Italian
MRI2933 – Norwegian
MRI2937 – Swedish
MRI2938 – English Uppercase DBCS
MRI2939 – German Multinational
MRI2940 – French Multinational
MRI2942 – Italian Multinational
MRI2954 – Arabic
MRI2956 – Turkish
MRI2957 – Greek
MRI2961 – Hebrew
MRI2962 – Japanese (5026)
MRI2963 – Belgian Dutch Multinational
MRI2966 – Belgian French Multinational
MRI2975 – Czech
MRI2976 – Hungarian
MRI2978 – Polish
MRI2979 – Russian
MRI2980 – Brazilian Portuguese
MRI2981 – Canadian French Multinational
MRI2984 – English DBCS
MRI2986 – Korean DBCS (KS)
MRI2987 – Traditional Chinese DBCS
MRI2989 – Simplified Chinese DBCS (GB)
MRI2992 – Romanian
MRI2994 – Slovakian
MRI2996 – Portuguese Multinational

So if you need to transfer the installer over a slow connection you only need to transfer the language(s) you require.

To set the language you can use the CWBPRIMARYLANG property to set the language eg CWBPRIMARYLANG=Mri2923 and the /v switch can be used to pass MSI Public properties to the installer.

Note that the installer requires a reboot so you may want to add REBOOT=ReallySupress to prevent this.

I use Master Return Codes for this in Altiris.

This the Altiris Job I use:

IBM References:

Other references: