swagentd GOTCHA

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi,

yesterday I (cold) installed 11.00 on a customer's D370.
Or rather I had to continue an installation that broke owe to a CDROM drive that went defunct right when I wanted to insert the latest Support Plus CD after the core installation already had passed.
Pretty handy timing, eyh?
Thus the customer ordered an HP techie to replace the drive (the box is still under HW support) during the following week.
So I assume the SE restarted the installaion from the core OS/recovery CD, because when I reappeared at the spot it was still lingering in media change phase where it demanded the Support Plus CD.
Unfortunately, if you don't specify the wanted NIC in the initial advanced menu selection screens (I guess the SE didn't care about, because he only wanted to get rid of his drive), the installer automatically grabs the 1st NIC it spots (i.e. the built-in one), and doesn't care about also selecting any other needed drivers for further NICs.
This behavior (bug?) always annoyed me with HP-UX installation.
I think I don't need to mention that the LAN wire was plugged in the extension dual NIC card of product ID J3516A (which ID I didn't know at the time), and could hardly be moved in order to open the backdoor for replugging the cable.
OK, when the OS was up a lanscan would only show the internal NIC because the installer wasn't clever enough to have installed the needed driver for J3516A.
Luckilly ioscan revealed the product ID
so that I was able to manually postinstall the missing btlan4 driver.
So I thought.
Because I had no network I wasn't able to lousily install a mere driver from the mounted core OS CD because the damned swagentd (or other SD piece of SW) timed out on RPC and moaned that it couldn't finish these calls.
This was really a catch.
I wished for an swinstall option like
"-x do_rpc_calls=false", or "-x "use_swagentd=false", but didn't find anything close in the various sd manpages.
So after that long prologue,
is there a way to swinstall without swagentd?
(I killed meanwhile through its -k switch but that didn't help either)

[RAC_1]

If I remember correctlym to let swinstall work without network, you can prepare the file - /var/adm/sw/standalone.

touch /var/adm/sw/standalone.

Hope this helps.

Anil

[Steven E. Protter]

Couple of things.

the J3516A will not be recognized by the system if a 64 bit installation of the OS was done. No drivers go in becasue the HSC slot can't be used for that NIC card on 64 bit 11.00 or 11i.

Also, the default install on 11i v1 (maybe also 11.00) has no nsswtich.conf file. You have to create it or copy one of the templates in /etc otherwise swagentd won't function.

You didn't say whetherit was a 32 bit or 64 bit install. I know the D380 supports 64 bit. But this may not have been the SE's fault. Not every SE I've talked to knows about the 32 versus 64 bit install vis a vis the J3516A network card.

There is no way to install sd/ux depots without swagentd running. If you can get a command prompt and set up an nssswtich.conf file you may get by this problem.

SEP

[Robert-Jan Goossens · Accepted solution]

Hi Ralph,

Yes there is.

Check this doc.

http://www4.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000063226311

Best regards,
Robert-Jan

[Ralph Grothe]

Great, that was exactly what would have saved my nerves!

Thank you Robert for pointing me to the work-around.
I knew that even something as compulsive as swagentd must be persuadable to use the loopback device like every demeaning networked application.
Unfortunately on the scene there was no chance to consult knowledge base.

SEP the OS/kernel is 32Bit.
I'm generally not a HW nerd (especially when it comes to enterprise league stuff, unlike the soho stuff one has easy access to).
Although I admit a decent sysadmin should know his HW.
I always mix up fancy or meaningless product specifiers and IDs, thus driving my colleagues insane.
Vendors almost have a poetic creativity in branding.
E.g. what is an HSC slot?
Holds Silly Cards?
Hope Somethings Configure?
Hilarious Subsystem Crusher?

I cannot recall if I configured resolv.conf and nsswitch.conf before my attempts to install the driver.

Anyway, comparing swinstall to other package installers, like Solaris' (BSD-inherrited) pkgadd, which although they have not a 3rd of the featurism SD offers,
at least they don't rely on a functioning network (or are easier to comprehend)