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Software Distributor Administration Guide: HP-UX 11i v1, 11i v2, and 11i v3 > Chapter 8 Reliability and Performance

Staging

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The standard way to install software onto multiple targets is to specify a single source depot and each target that is to receive the software. However, some software distribution environments require that you manage software on large numbers of geographically dispersed target systems. This may require the use of one or more intermediate source depots or staging areas. This variant on the standard model is referred to as a staged installation.

There are two reasons for using a staged installation:

  1. Minimize the amount of data transferred across a slow and expensive segment of your network.

  2. More easily ensure a successful installation on all targets by reducing the risk of an unreliable segment in your network.

If your environment has targets organized in separate, local area networks (LAN) and connected via a low-throughput, less-reliable wide area network (WAN), staging software to intermediate depots that are local to each grouping of targets and then doing the installation using these intermediate depots reduces the amount of data that travels over the WAN segment.

By doing so, you also decrease the likelihood that a problem with the WAN will interrupt the installation step.

Before you do a staged installation, you must first decide where the intermediate depots should reside. Here are two possible approaches:

  1. If the targets are grouped, you can put an intermediate depot on one system in each group and configure the other targets to use it as their alternate source. This approach requires that each target in the group be configured to use the designated intermediate depot.

  2. If making sure that installations succeed is of highest importance, you can locate the intermediate depots on the targets themselves, one-per-target. An advantage to this approach is that it doesn’t necessarily require that you configure an alternate source on each target. However, this approach requires that each target system have enough disk space to accommodate the intermediate depot.

To do a staged installation:

  1. First, decide on the location of the intermediate depots and use the swcopy command to copy the software from your master depot to them. This step is no different from a normal multi-target copy operation.

    swcopy -s master -t depot_list NewApp

    In this example, the master source depot containing the product NewApp is in the default /var/spool/sw depot location and a file named depot_list contains the list of intermediate depots.

    The depot_list could identify the designated intermediate depots that have been configured for each group of targets, or it could identify an intermediate depot located on each target.

  2. Next, use the swinstall command combined with the option use_alternate_source=true to do the actual installation. The use_alternate_source option is specified from either the CLI (i.e., -x use_alternate_source=true) or via the Options Editor window in the GUI. The default value is false.

    # swinstall -s master  \ -x use_alternate_source=true \      -t targ_list NewApp

    The use_alternate_source=true option instructs each target to use its own configured source for the installation. The source that is specified on the swinstall CLI is used only by the controller for the validation of your software selections. The file targ_list contains the list of targets.

    When use_alternate_source is true, each target agent looks for the corresponding swagent.alternate_source option in its own defaults file. The protocol sequence and endpoint given by the option, swagent.rpc_binding_info, are used when the agent attempts to contact the depot specified by swagent.alternate_source. An alternate source is specified using the host:/path, /path, or host syntax.

    • If there is a host:/depot_path specified in the target’s swagent.alternate_source option, the agent gets the software from this source. If only a host is specified, the target agent uses the same depot path used by the controller.

    • If the target doesn’t have an alternate source, the agent uses the same depot path used by the controller, but it will apply this path to its own file system. This lets you do staged installations without any target configuration at all, by locating the intermediate depot on each target system at the same file system location as the master depot (approach 2 above).

Because the swcopy and swinstall steps in a staged installation are separate, SD-UX cannot enforce consistency between master and intermediate depots. You must ensure that the software available from the intermediate depots is consistent with that on the master depot.

If master and intermediate depots are out-of-synch when you perform the swinstall step, you may encounter errors if software that is on the master depot is not available from one or more intermediate depots.

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