Software Distributor Administration Guide (March 2009)

built-in knowledge of the host on which the depot originated. In particular, an ACL
default realm will be wrong and local users will be confused with users on the
originating host. For example, attempts to add local users to the access list will, in fact,
grant access to remote users. There is no way to alter the default realm of an ACL from that
set when it is created.
Another common problem with such images occurs if you import them to systems that
cannot resolve all the hostnames (see resolver(4) and nslookup(1)) that exist in the ACLs.
If your purpose is to create a “staged” installation, use swcopy to propagate the depot.
This creates new ACLs, based on local templates, for each instance of the depot.
If the sole intent of a depot is for such image distribution, you may wish to set the
swpackage create_target_acls option to false to prevent ACL creation on the
depot and products during the swpackage operation. This option creates tape and
CD-ROM images. Depots and products without ACLs grant the local superuser all
privileges, while all other users and systems have read access. Note that when you
copy or install this ACL-less depot with swcopy or swinstall, the copies (installations)
are automatically protected by ACLs based on templates on the destination host.
B.2.4 Slow Network Performance
When using swinstall or swcopy in an environment where network bandwidth is
the “bottleneck,” the file transfer rate between source and target can become very slow.
Resolution
The compress_files=true option compresses files transferred from a source depot
to a target. This can reduce network usage by approximately 50%; the exact amount of
compression depends on the type of files. Binary files compress less than 50%, text files
more.
The greatest throughput improvements are seen when transfers are across a slow
network (approximately 50kbyte/sec or less), and the source depot server is serving a
few target hosts at a time.
NOTE: This option should be set to true only when network bandwidth is clearly
restricting total throughput. If this option is used with a fast network or with a depot
server simultaneously connected to many target hosts, this option can actually reduce
overall throughput or performance, unless the source depot is already compressed.
If it is not clear that this option will help in your situation, compare the throughput of
a few install or copy tasks (both with and without compression) before changing this
option value.
See Chapter 8: “Reliability and Performance ” (page 171) for more information about
performance options.
B.2 Common Problems 337