Software Distributor Administrator Guide (September 2010)

By doing so, you also decrease the likelihood that a problem with the WAN will
interrupt the installation step.
Before you do a staged installation, you must first decide where the intermediate depots
should reside. Here are two possible approaches:
1. If the targets are grouped, you can put an intermediate depot on one system in
each group and configure the other targets to use it as their alternate source. This
approach requires that each target in the group be configured to use the designated
intermediate depot.
2. If making sure that installations succeed is of highest importance, you can locate
the intermediate depots on the targets themselves, one-per-target. An advantage
to this approach is that it doesn’t necessarily require that you configure an alternate
source on each target. However, this approach requires that each target system
have enough disk space to accommodate the intermediate depot.
To do a staged installation:
1. First, decide on the location of the intermediate depots and use the swcopy
command to copy the software from your master depot to them. This step is no
different from a normal multi-target copy operation.
swcopy -s master -t depot_list NewApp
In this example, the master source depot containing the product NewApp is in the
default /var/spool/sw depot location and a file named depot_list contains
the list of intermediate depots.
The depot_list could identify the designated intermediate depots that have
been configured for each group of targets, or it could identify an intermediate
depot located on each target.
2. Next, use the swinstall command combined with the option
use_alternate_source=true to do the actual installation. The
use_alternate_source option is specified from either the CLI (i.e., -x
use_alternate_source=true) or via the Options Editor window in the GUI.
The default value is false.
# swinstall -s master \
-x use_alternate_source=true \
-t targ_list NewApp
The use_alternate_source=true option instructs each target to use its own
configured source for the installation. The source that is specified on the
swinstall CLI is used only by the controller for the validation of your software
selections. The file targ_list contains the list of targets.
When use_alternate_source is true, each target agent looks for the
corresponding swagent.alternate_source option in its own defaults file.
The protocol sequence and endpoint given by the option,
swagent.rpc_binding_info, are used when the agent attempts to contact the
8.9 Staging 181