Administrator's Guide

3 Updating and maintaining software on the clone
After cloning the active system image, you can use drd runcmd to run a limited set of commands
and to apply patches to the inactive system image. This chapter describes this process.
For details of the drd runcmd command, including available options and extended options, see
The drd runcmd command.
NOTE: You must be logged in as root to run any DRD command.
3.1 DRD-Safe commands and Packages
The drd runcmd operation runs a command on the inactive system image that does not make
any changes to the booted system, the running kernel, or the process space. This enables a system
administrator to make changes to the inactive system image without incurring any disruption to the
currently booted system.
NOTE: The drd runcmd command suppresses all reboots. The option -x autoreboot is
ignored when a swinstall, swremove, or update-ux command is executed by drd runcmd.
Not all commands can safely be executed by the drd runcmd operation. For example, commands
that start or stop daemons or change dynamic kernel tuneables are disruptive to current processes
and must be prevented by the drd runcmd operation.
Restrictions on commands executed by drd runcmd are:
• When calling swinstall and update-ux, drd runcmd supports installation from directory
depots on the booted system and on remote servers. Note that installing from serial depots or
from depots on the inactive system image is not supported.
• drd runcmd can also be used to swlist, swverify, swremove, and swmodify software
that is installed on the inactive image. It cannot be used to list or modify any depot's contents.
Using these commands outside of drd runcmd allows for depot listing and management.
Commands that are not disruptive to the booted system and perform appropriate actions on the
inactive system are known as DRD-safe. For this release of DRD, a short list of commands is
recognized by the drd runcmd operation to be DRD-safe. An attempt to use DRD to run commands
that are not DRD-safe will terminate with an ERROR return code without executing the command.
A number of Software Distributor commands have been made safe at a sufficient maintenance
level of SW-DIST. The DRD product has a package co-requisite on a minimum release of SW-DIST.
(For details of the DRD product dependencies, see the following webpage: https://
h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/
displayInstallInfo.do?productNumber=DynRootDisk#download.)
Similarly, drd runcmd update-ux includes a run-time check for the revision of SWManager
(SWM), which provides DRD-safe tools used during the update. This functionality supports updates
on the clone from an older version of HP-UX 11i v3 to HP-UX 11i v3 update 4 or later. (For details
of the DRD product dependencies, see the following webpage: https://h20392.www2.hp.com/
portal/swdepot/displayInstallInfo.do?productNumber=DynRootDisk#download.)
The DRD-safe commands are the following:
• swinstall
• swremove
• swlist
• swmodify
• swverify
• swjob
3.1 DRD-Safe commands and Packages 17