Depot installation from NFS exported CDROM of Linux box

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi sw* wizards,

our server bunker is a mile away from our administration places.
Unfortunately we don't have a HP-UX box with CDROM drive here (only the servers have them).
I want to install a codeword protected depot (i.e. OnlineJFS), but cannot recall for which of our hundreds of HP-UX CDs the codeword I once upon a time had obtained is valid (forgot to put down the CD set ID :-(
This looks like a longer trial and error process because I cannot contact http://licensing.hp.com to obtain a new codeword (this webserver's reachability is lousy!).
To avoid hours of unproductive diskjockey sessions in this desolate, uncosy bunker I want to mount the CDs on a Linux box here, export this NFS share from there to the target HP-UX box, NFS mount the exported share there, swregister it and fiddle with my codeword to find out if I hit the right CD.
The export and remote mount is no problem (used "mount -F nfs -r linux_box:/cdrom /cdrom"), but every attempt to swregister, swlist, swcopy, and swinstall is quitted with an I/O error.
Also tried various tars, cpios, dds into some depot file to no avail.
I know this all sounds ridiculously stupid for such a trivial task as to install a piece of software for which we have several licenses.
Other package managers like rpm, dselect, pkgadd, ports collection etc. may lack the featurism of HP's sw* commands, but they are much more straight forward to use.

[Stefan Farrelly · Accepted solution]

Software Distributor (and other HP tools) hate NFS mounted CD's. Instead, copy all the contents of an NFS mounted CD to a directory somewhere and try installing from this directory, works much better.

As for your codeword, have you had a look around for a .codeword file either in /var/adm/sw or someones home directory ? you may be lucky and find one.

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Stefan,

thank you so much for your hint to the codeword file.
You saved my day (:-))
I was lucky to find the exact key and the CD ID for the software I have to install (I wouldn't want to post an "-exec cat" here ;-)

# find /var/adm/sw -name \*codeword\* -exec ll {} \;
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 126 Aug 22 2000 /var/adm/sw/.codewords