The easiest way to achieve this would be to change the authentication for this service. Unluckily this service is used by a lot of other clients, so I can’t change it out of the blue. Next thing that came to my mind was using the underlying tomcat to do some IP-based blocking. After some searching around I gave that one up. Tibco has a really complex deployment model for BusinessWorks so I wasn’t able to even find the process-specific section for the tomcat engine.
After some searching around in the documentation (actually several hours – hooray to a usable documentation) I found some parameter which allows you to block IPs with some TRA-file parameters. In case you want to look it up yourself it is in the BusinessWorks documentation under ‘Administration’ -> Chapter 8 ‘Custom Engine Properties’ -> ‘Available Custom Engine Properties’ (and another hooray to the excellent formatting – Note to Tibco: HTML has tags, so you can do more with the content then continuous text – even some breaks would enhance the experience).
So back to the point:

bw.plugin.http.server.allowIPAddresses
bw.plugin.http.server.restrictIPAddresses

Both tags are rather self explanatory so you can use right away. Tibco says you can use it with a single IP, a list of IPs (comma-separated) or regular expression. As stated before this highlight of a documentation doesn’t say what reg-exp syntax means. I guess Tibco means they use the Tomcat engine for evaluation of these values an that means they use the Java syntax described here.

TIBINS202527: Error: ERROR: You are running a 64-bit product installer on a 32-bit system.
This is not supported.

The Problem was I was running a 64-bit OS with a 64-bit Kernel:

 uname -a
Linux client1 2.6.28.5 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Feb 17 17:42:33 CET 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So I tried to find the problem. First I needed some more output what the installer is actually doing. So I used the logging option to get all the debug output.

 ./TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.bin -console -is:log output

So when you look closer to this log you can see that the command which is running the installer looks like this:

Executing launch script command: “/tmp/isjI8lFYy/bin/java” -cp “”:”TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”TRA.5.6.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”tibrv.8.1.1-simple_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”jre.1.5.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86_64.jar”:”Designer.5.6.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86_64.jar”:”tpcl.5.6.0-simple_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”hawk.4.8.1-simple_linux24gl23_x86_64.jar”:”/tmp/isjA5jEsB/TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar”:”" -Dtemp.dir=”/tmp” -Dis.jvm.home=”/tmp/isjI8lFYy” -Dis.jvm.temp=”1″ -Dis.media.home=”/tmp/isjA5jEsB/TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar” -Dis.launcher.file=”/home/jens/tmp/TIB_tra-suite_5.6.0_linux24gl23_x86_64/./TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.bin” -Dis.jvm.file=”/tmp/isjI8lFYy/jvm” -Dis.external.home=”/home/jens/tmp/TIB_tra-suite_5.6.0_linux24gl23_x86_64/.” -Xms20m -Xmx128m run -home TRA.5.6.0-suite_linux24gl23_x86.jar “-console”

Now that I had the command which is starting the installer I began to trace what this process is doing. To do a strace properly you just have to prepend ‘strace’ and than redirect the error output to a file (cause it is quiet a lot). So after doing this I found something interesting in the log.

[pid 32651] execve(“/bin/uname”, [0xffffffffdf47dc88, "-p"], [/* 1757 vars */]) = 0

As you can see it runs the command ‘uname -p’. This command returns ‘unknown’ for a default debian system. You also have this problem if you are running a self compiled kernel from kernel.org. As for the TIBCO supported systems (SUSE ans redhat) they return something different. After trying the same command on a openSUSE I found that ‘x86_64′ should be the correct string. After I bit of trial and error I found out that the result of this command is written to a file name ‘kernelbits_jens.txt’ in the temp directory.

So here the simple solution to the problem.
You just need to create the arch file manually and make it read-only so the installer can’t overwrite it. Here the command:

echo 'x86_64' > kernelbits_`whoami`.txt

Now the installer worked absolutely fine for me.
I already notified the TIBCO support about the problem. As for now there will be no fix. But I hope they will correct this behavior for future installer.