WAE Design GUI Installation

This section contains the following topics:

Overview

This section provides instructions for installing the WAE Design GUI. You additionally need to install the WAE Design license and if applicable, install the floating license server.

The installation process does not explain how to install any drivers or require any changes to the operating system. You can download and install the files to any folder or directory.

Prerequisites

The following are WAE design GUI installation prerequisites:

  • A license is required for all features except for the example plan files. If you have questions about obtaining a license, contact your support representative or system administrator.

  • Meet the necessary system requirements and package dependencies. For a list of these, see the “Installation Requirements” chapter in the Cisco WAE Installation Guide.

  • If you are using the WAE Design GUI and the Parse Configs tool ( File > Get Plan from > Configs ), Java environment variables must be configured correctly, and JAVA_HOME or JRE_HOME must point to a valid JDK/JRE-11 installation.

    For example:

    • Linux—Enter the following command:
      admin@system1 ~ # export JRE_HOME=<JDK/JRE_installation_path>

Linux Installation

Before you begin

Create an installation directory /opt/cariden or /opt/wae that has wae privileges.

Procedure

Step 1

Download the digitally signed Cisco WAE Design software package from the Cisco download site.

Step 2

Verify and extract the digitally signed binary to a location of your choice. See Verification of Digitally Signed Images.

Step 3

Enter the following command:

./WAE-Design-k9-7.6.0-Linux-x86_64.bin

Step 4

Choose the installation directory that you created at the beginning.

Step 5

Install and verify the license. See License Installation.

Verification of Digitally Signed Images

The Cisco WAE Design software is digitally signed. This is to ensure that the WAE Design software running on your systems is secure and has not been tampered with, and that the software originated from a trusted source.

Verify Signed Images for Linux

Procedure

Step 1

For Linux, the certificates and digital signatures are embedded in the downloaded files - WAE-Design-k9-7.6.0-Linux-x86_64.signed.bin.

Step 2

Run the self-extracting signed binary. This extracts the Release Binary and validates using the signature file.

Verification in Linux

[admin@wae-vm-21 workspace.signed]$ ./WAE-Design-k9-7.6.0-Linux-x86_64.signed.bin
Unpacking...
Verifying signature...
Downloading CA certificate from http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/certs/crcam2.cer ...
Successfully downloaded and verified crcam2.cer.
Downloading SubCA certificate from http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/certs/innerspace.cer ...
Successfully downloaded and verified innerspace.cer.
Successfully verified root, subca and end-entity certificate chain.
Successfully fetched a public key from WAE-CCO_RELEASE.cer.
Successfully verified the signature of WAE-Design-k9-7.6.0-Linux-x86_64.bin using WAE-CCO_RELEASE.cer

Step 3

The generated WAE-Design-k9-7.6.0-Linux-x86_64.bin is the Linux installer for WAE.

Run the Linux installer once more to extract the Linux binary.

Start WAE Design

To start WAE Design from the directory in which the WAE Design software is installed:

Procedure

Step 1

Double-click the wae_design executable.

Step 2

From the CLI, enter:

./wae_design

(Optional) You can associate the plan file using the .pln format with the wae_design executable. Double-clicking a .pln file opens the plan in a new instance of the GUI.

Troubleshoot WAE Design Installation

Resolving ncurses Library Error

On Red Hat 8 and later versions, the libncurses.so.5 binary is not available by default. As a result, this error message may appear while launching WAE Design. 

error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: 
No such file or directory

To resolve this issue, create soft links for libncurses.so.5 using the following commands: 

  • ln -s "/usr/lib64/libncurses.so.6.2"  "/usr/lib64/libncurses.so.5"
  • ln -s "/usr/lib64/libtinfo.so.6.2" "/usr/lib64/libtinfo.so.5"

Resolving Qt Plugin Errors

After successfully installing, you may encounter an issue while launching WAE Design due to a missing Qt platform plugin. This error message may appear: 

This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. 
Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, 
wayland, webgl, xcb.

To resolve this issue, install the PyQt5 package using this command:

  • sudo yum install PyQt5

If the issue persists, install these packages manually:

  • sudo yum install xcb*
  • sudo yum install xkb*
  • sudo yum install libxkb*