topic Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape in Operating System - HP-UX

Help needed for bootable installation tape

Jun Zhang_4 — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 14:06:16 GMT

In the make_medialif manpage example 9, making of a bootable depot tape is explained. My intention is to go a little further, to append a x.tar.gz file to the tape and then run a post-install script to deploy the package contained in the file x.tar.gz, but everything should be singly contained in the boot tape.
Can I do that?
Jun

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

Rodney Hills — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 18:53:12 GMT

Have you looking to "ignite"?

A utility called "make_tape_recovery" will make a bootable tape with vg00 tar saved on it.

I believe their is a way to add post-install scripts.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

twang — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 22:11:57 GMT

The best way to make a bootable tape is ignite-ux,
1. install ignite-ux here:
http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/download.html#pax1
2. after installation, you can simply run "make_tape_recovery" to create a bootable tape:
# /opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -Av -x inc_entire=vg00
the tape can used to boot the machine and recover the vg00.

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

Keith Bevan_1 — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 05:44:02 GMT

Jun,

As previously suggested above, Ignite/UX and make_tape_recovery are the best path.

Have a look at the following :-

http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX

I have used ignite/UX and created ignite boot tapes for our HPUX 11i 9000 servers.

One thing to remember is that it is worth creating the tapes for the entire root volume group (vg00). Following install of ignite/ux you can achieve this by typing :-

/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -Av -x inc_entire=vg00

It works, and its easy to accomplish!

Keith

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

GK_5 — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 09:15:55 GMT

The best way to make a bootable tape is ignite. It is free tool from hp. Can be downloaded at

http://www.software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=IGNITEUXB

Use following command
/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -v -a /dev/rmt/0mn -x inc_entire=vg00

It will create bootable tape.

-GK-

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

Jun Zhang_4 — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 10:04:51 GMT

Thank you so much for the replies.
My customers are located nation wide, and my company haven't assign anybody as field engineer. All I know is that the customers have some A,D,L,H,K class machines. Eventhough I can dial in to a customer machine and get the disk configuration, it may not be convenient for me to make one at my site, I don't have all those classed machines. So I liked the idea of the depot tape: get everything on it and let the installer to pick and answer questions.
My immediate step is to make a depot on the disk including all the source packages (.tar.gz) and scripts I prepared, associated with the information like where they should be copied to the target system, and then swcopy it to the serialdepot, just like I do to core or app.
You may have better ideas, or be able to help me to make such a depot.

Jun

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

Rodney Hills — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 10:17:57 GMT

When you said "bootable", I assumed booting up an hpux system. If you are distributing software, depots are the way to go.

But rather then tape, you could burn a CD. HPUX11 has made it pretty easy to mount Rock-Ridge formated CDs.

Easier to handle and swinstall can read the depot file directly.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

Re: Help needed for bootable installation tape

Jun Zhang_4 — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 10:53:58 GMT

Rodney,
If you do a manpage view of make_medialif, and see Example 9, we'll be on the same page. I can as well choose to burn CD. The only obstacle is the capacity of a single CD, and most of my customers don't have DVD drive. A DDS-1 tape without compression is 2GB by capacity, which is the size required for OS + applications.

Jun