Building a PA-RISC Installation Tape

This section describes building an installation tape for use on PA-RISC systems. This functionality is not supported on Itanium-based systems, although you can utilize “Tape Recovery With No Tape Boot Support — Two-Step Media Recovery”.




	IMPORTANT: The media and data format (density and compression) of the installation tape you create must be compatible with the tape devices of client systems on which it will be read. You should consider writing the tape using a device special file (DSF) that selects the most compatible data format settings.

Possible Installation Tape Contents

A PA-RISC tape may consist of

Just a LIF volume.
A LIF volume followed by one or more archives (A1, A2, A3, ...).
A LIF volume followed by an optional archive (A1, or Empty), a serial depot (D), and zero or more additional archives (A2, ...).

By far, the most common configuration is a LIF volume followed by one archive. The archive can be a golden archive or a recovery archive depending on the purpose of the media.

The high-level structures of possible PA-RISC installation tape layouts are shown below.

Figure 14-1 Possible PA-RISC Installation Tape Layouts

Logical Interchange Format

The first file on a PA-RISC bootable tape is a logical interchange format (LIF) volume containing all the components required to boot from the tape. It also includes the Ignite-UX toolset and configuration information that controls how Ignite-UX will operate. Additionally, this tape file will include configuration files that describe installation functionality. See Appendix C for information regarding the contents of a LIF volume.

For PA-RISC systems you can create a boot tape that is made up of the LIF volume only. This boot tape could then be used to boot a system, and then the software could be downloaded over the network.

The make_medialif command creates the LIF volume. A typical LIF volume would have the following contents:

See Appendix C for a full description of LIF contents.




	IMPORTANT: The first 8 KB of the install file system ([W\|V\|I]INSTALLFS) can contain Ignite-UX configuration content. If it does, this information is used first and can override configuration statements in the LIF `INDEX` and `CONFIG` files. If the tape contains a golden archive, you will want to consider whether the tape should contain special config content to control system setup in some custom way. If the golden archive will be used with different system configs, conditional expressions can be used to adapt the config appropriately, such as `run_ui`, which controls whether the installation is interactive or not, and `server` and `sd_server`, which can be used to control network installation. See instl_adm(4) for more information.

Archives and Depots

The LIF volume is followed by the first archive (a golden archive or a recovery archive depending on the purpose of the media) or is empty if the installation is solely from the software depot.

The first archive is then followed by either a serial depot or another archive. There can only be one serial depot on a tape, and it must be the third file on the tape. If the tape includes a serial depot, the make_config command must be used to create the config file for the depot content. This configuration file is then modified to reflect the final destination of the depot and the depot is written to the tape.

The previous files can be followed by one or more additional archives, limited only by the capacity of the tape. These archives are optional.




	TIP: If a tape will contain multiple archives, you might want to place the most commonly used archive first so installations take less time.

Creating and Modifying an Archive Configuration File for Tape

Create the archive configuration file — Proceed as described in Chapter 11 or Chapter 15, depending on the usage of the installation tape.

Modify the archive access attributes — Change the following archive access attributes in the sw_source core clause:

Find the source_type attribute and change the value from NET to MT (for example, source_type=MT).
Find the change_media=FALSE attribute line and remove the comment hash mark ( #).
Find the nfs_source attribute line and place a comment hash mark before it (for example, #nfs_source=).
The above edits change the source type from network (NET) access (which is NFS, ftp or remsh) to magnetic tape (MT). Since the archive is going to reside on the same media as the configuration file, change_media is set to FALSE by uncommenting that attribute. To stop the NFS mount attempt, the nfs_source attribute is commented out.

Modify the archive path and impacts — In the HARDWARE_MODEL ~ 9000.* clause:

Find the archive_path attribute and set the value to the number of EOF markers that have to be skipped to get to the archive (archive_path=n). There is an EOF marker after the LIF volume, archives, depots, and empties. For example, to reach the first archive on the tape, the archive_path would have to be set to “1”, indicating the LIF volume EOF would be skipped and the archive begins thereafter.
Find the impacts attribute with the value / 27KB and change the value to what is reported by archive_impact.
Optionally, you can find the sw_sel and description attributes and change their values to something more descriptive and applicable for your situation. These modified values are visible on Basic tab of the Ignite-UX GUI.

Other edits —

The archive_type must match what was done by make_sys_image. For more information about archive_type, see instl_adm(4).
If you have only one archive, as in this example, you can delete the entire clause called golden image2. It is included in the template file in case you have two different types of archives, such as one for 32-bit and one for 64-bit architecture.
If more than one archive per architecture is on the media, use an exrequisite attribute between them so only one archive can be selected at one time.




	IMPORTANT: Do not change anything else in the file, unless you are very sure of what you are doing. In particular, it is potentially dangerous to change the `sw_category` and other `sw_source` and `sw_sel` attributes not mentioned above.

Creating and Modifying a Serial Depot and its Configuration File for Tape

A depot put on a tape is called a serial depot. It can exist as a regular file, but it cannot be registered, which means it cannot be accessed remotely.

Create the serial depot configuration file — Issue the following command:

# make_config -s /var/tmp/depot -c /var/tmp/depot_cfg

Modify the serial depot config file — The depot must always be the third file on the tape, so there is no need to specify a path to the depot. Remove the following lines:

sd_server = IP_address
sd_depot_dir = /var/tmp/depot

Change the source_type attribute from NET to MT:

source_type=MT

Create the serial depot — To create a serial depot from /var/tmp/depot and store it in /var/tmp/serialdepot, enter:

# swpackage -s /var/tmp/depot -x media_type=tape @ /var/tmp/serialdepot

PA-RISC Installation Tape Creation Example

Assumptions

The following example assumes you have created a golden archive and a depot containing all the applications you want to install. Including a serial depot is optional and is not needed if the tape will only contain a golden archive, which is normally the case.

The golden archive in this example is assumed to have been created using make_sys_image on a system running HP-UX 11i v1 (B.11.11). See Chapter 11 for information regarding golden archive creation.

The archive is in gzip compressed tar format and is named /var/tmp/myOSarchive.gz.

The archive_impact command should be used to obtain disk-space usage information for this archive so that disk space impacts can be included in the config content. The make_config command should be used to create a config file that describes the archive content. It's assumed that a config file named myOSarchive_cfg has been created for this archive.

The optional depot is named /var/tmp/serialdepot and its config file is named /var/tmp/depot_cfg.

Example PA-RISC Installation Tape Creation

Create the LIF volume.
The LIF will be created in /var/tmp/lifvol by entering the following make_medialif command:
make_medialif -f /opt/ignite/data/Rel_B.11.11/config \ -f /var/tmp/myOSarchive_cfg -f /var/tmp/depot_cfg \ -l /var/tmp/lifvol -r B.11.11
The LIF volume now contains the default settings Ignite-UX provides, plus information on the archives and depot.
Modify the install file system configuration.
You can control the environment in which Ignite-UX operates at client installation time by changing the run_ui and control_from_server configuration parameters in the install file system ([W|V|I]INSTALLFS). When control_from_server is true, an attempt is made to contact the Ignite-UX server as defined in the configuration information. For more information, see instl_adm(4).
To set run_ui to TRUE and control_from_server to FALSE using instl_adm, execute the following steps:
- Create a temporary configuration file:
  instl_adm -d -F /var/tmp/lifvol > /var/tmp/cfg
- Open /var/tmp/cfg for editing.
- Add or change the run_ui variable.
  For an interactive installation, run_ui=TRUE. For a noninteractive installation, run_ui=FALSE — no interaction occurs and the installation proceeds according to the configuration information provided to Ignite-UX..
- Add or change the control_from_server variable.
  To control the installation from the Ignite-UX server, set control_from_server=TRUE. An attempt will be made to contact the server.
- Check the syntax of your changes to avoid writing errors to the install file system:
  instl_adm -T -f /var/tmp/cfg
- Write the modified temporary configuration file into the LIF volume:
  instl_adm -F /var/tmp/lifvol -f /var/tmp/cfg
- Verify your changes:
  instl_adm -d -f /var/tmp/lifvol
Select the appropriate tape device file.
Create the tape using the proper density, no compression, and a no-rewind device file. See insf(1M), tape(7), and stape(7) for more information about tape device special file creation and selection.
Note that a no-rewind tape device special file must be used. Normally, a default AT&T semantic tape device special file is used, for example, /dev/rmt/0mn.

Create the installation tape.

This series of commands creates a tape with DDS-1 characteristics and copies the files in the correct tape layout as described in “Possible Installation Tape Contents”:

mt -t /dev/rmt/0mn rew

dd if=/var/tmp/lifvol of=/dev/rmt/0mn obs=2k

dd if=/var/tmp/myOSarchive.gz of=/dev/rmt/0mn obs=10k

dd if=/var/tmp/serialdepot of=/dev/rmt/0mn obs=10k

mt -t /dev/rmt/0mn rew




	TIP: You must ensure that you use a no-rewind device file, such as `/dev/rmt/0mn`. This prevents the tape device from rewinding between the successive dd commands in this step and overwriting files that were previously written to the tape.

The tape is now ready to use for the installation of PA-RISC systems.

Building a PA-RISC Installation Tape

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