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swinstall rebooted the wrong machine

 
Ashwani Kashyap
Honored Contributor

swinstall rebooted the wrong machine

I have a HP-9000 K460 running on HP-UX 10.20.This machine was built from an ignite tape taken from another machine which is exactly similar to it in all respects .This other machine was in a remote location.
After buildig the machine I loaded 100BT softare and some patches on it and then the machine went into production .
Few days back the remote machine came back to my data centre to be installed as test machine. Both these machines are exactly the same , even the hostname is same but they have different IP addreses and we made distinct entries in DNS for uniqueness.Now as I was trying to install 100BT software from the system console in this new machine, it kept telling me that it is already installed , so I forced it to overwrite.And when I said it is OK to reboot , instead of rebooting this machine it rebooted the production machine and later only did I realise that swinstall was trying to install the software on the production machine ( and hence that message)while I was physically trying to install it on the test machine by running swinstall on its console.
I do not have software distributor installed , so how can swinstall do a remote install/reboot . Both the machines have same hostnames but distinct IP's and I always thought that swinstall looks for the loopback address only and can only pull from other machines but can not push to other machines unless SD is installed which I do not have.

Can somebody help me understand this and let me know how to prevent this in future.I know two systems should not have same hostnames but that was just temporary and was going to change any way.
This is great a security breach because anyone can change the hostname tro match other systems hostname and can use swinstall to reboot it

Thanks for all your help.

Ashwani
2 REPLIES 2
Rick Garland
Honored Contributor

Re: swinstall rebooted the wrong machine

Sounds as if the name resolution is not entirely correct. You state that the DNS knows, what happens when you do an nslookup ?
Ashwani Kashyap
Honored Contributor

Re: swinstall rebooted the wrong machine

Hi Rick ,

when I do nslookup
it comes with correct hostname (ash for instance)

when I do nslookup it comes out with "oldash" ash as the hostname which I have defined in DNS for test ash.