Useful information for network installers

[Benson I. Margulies]

After much fuming and fussing, I've mostly complete installing a
machine over the net. Here are some hints.

The difficulties arose because I didn't want the tapeless machine
to have all the lpp's installed that the original tapeful machine
did, so I didn't want to just take a big backup-to-file and
slurp that over the net. I wanted the same initial bos.obj that
I got when I read the tape.

For reasons unknown to me, IBM dosen't document the trivial way to do
this. One just fsf's the release tape two files, and then restores it
into a temporary directory. The resulting directory can then be backed
up to a file. Put it in /usr/lpp.install, and name it
bos.obj.whatever. Before re-backing up, make sure that the .fs.size
file that came off the tape is reasonable. The first network install
that I tried failed because bosboot required 14M in /tmp, and the
.fs.size from the tape only created a 12M /tmp. Since the target
machine had 2 120M disks, the install initially used only the first,
and didn't grow any file systems.

Now, you need backup images of whatever lpp's and their updates you
want to install. The "make backup format" option to smit "Install
optional program products with updates" almost never works, since it
dosen't expose the -w argument to bffcreate, and the temp restore
directories are BIG.

There is also a menu item for "make backup format files for later
use." This, so far as I can tell, is useless, since it assumes that
the media has only one file on it. It does not offer the menu of
all of the individual products and updates.

I resorted to a ksh scripts that loops running bffcreate and fsf 1.
This pulled all the products and updates off of the release tapes
and the 3002 tape.

Once you have the pieces you want in /usr/lpp.install and
/usr/lpp.update, ignore the blue pages instructions to create some
other directory for installation images. Just list /usr/lpp.install/*
and /usr/lpp.update/* in /u/netinst/db/choices.

My current strategy is to install only bos.obj and bosnet on
the target machine, and then mount /usr via nfs to get the benefit
of everything else. Time will tell if this trick will work.

-- 
Benson I. Margulies