Software Distributor Administration Guide for HP-UX 11i

Managing Software Depots
Depot Management Commands and Concepts
Chapter 4136
Tape Depot
• Tape (serial) depots offer advantages when you must copy or install
software over slow or unreliable network connections, including the
web. (First copy the depot to a local host, then install from the local
depot.)
• Software in a tape depot is formatted as a tar archive.
• Depots for actual cartridge, DAT and 9-track tape are referred to by
the path to the tape drive’s device file. For example: /dev/rmt/0m.
• You cannot modify or verify tape depots.
• You can create a tape depot only with the swpackage command. You
cannot use swcopy to copy software directly to a tape. See
Chapter 10, “Creating Software Packages,” on page 301 for more
information on swpackage.
• Software in a tape depot must first be transferred to a directory
depot before it can be accessed by other hosts on the network.
• A tape depot can be accessed by only one command at a time.
Depot Registration
To make the software in a depot available for use by SD-UX commands
across a network, you must register the depot. You can also unregister a
depot if you do not want it to be available. See “Registering and
Unregistering Depots (swreg)” on page 151 for more information.