Software Distributor (SD-UX) Administration Guide HP-UX 11i v1, 11i v2, and 11i v3 (762797-001, March 2014)

• Database checkpointing: SD-UX commands perform automatic checkpointing at the fileset level
by recording database transactions in the SD-UX depot catalog (IPD). In addition, checkpointing
at the file level is supported through attributes stored with the file.
• Compression: SD-UX supports compression functionality to reduce the amount of data being
transferred.
• Staging: SD-UX supports staging software to intermediate depots either on the installation
target or onto a source more accessible to the target, which has been preconfigured to use
the alternate source.
• Recovery: SD-UX supports automatic procedures to recover from failed installations, leaving
the system in the same state as previous. There are also manual means through use of multiple
versions.
• Multiple Versions: SD-UX supports installing multiple revisions of the same software on a system
at the same time, if the software supports it. Then, the old version can be unconfigured, and
the new version configured as the active version. In case of any problems, the old version can
be restored as the active version by unconfiguring the new version and reconfiguring the old.
Each of these topics is discussed in the following sections.
Groups and Source Options
Group and source options can help increase performance of some commands.
Target and software selections can be saved as group files and re-used. This reduces the need to
re-specify commonly used selections, which reduces the time required to perform swinstall,
swcopy, or swremove commands. See “Add/Save Software Group” (page 31), and “Software
and Target Lists” (page 117) for more information.
Specifying source depots in advance can reduce the number of screens needed to run or schedule
a swcopy or swinstall command. If you set the source= default option to your main source
depot, SD-UX can immediately list the products available. This eliminates the Source Selection
dialog, except when changing the default.
Large Numbers of Targets
The max_targetsoption applies to swinstall and swcopy operations. This option lets you
manage hundreds of targets with a single job by limiting the number of simultaneous targets to a
defined value. As each target completes the install or copy, another target is selected and started
until all targets have been completed. This keeps the number of active operations at or below the
user-defined limit.
The result of this option is that you can potentially manage hundreds of targets reliably in a single
task. This can also create a significant reduction in the time it takes to schedule a task.
Your server and network performance will determine the optimal setting for this option. The default
setting is 25.
Timeout Options
Timeout options control how long a task continues to retry low-level communications for file transfers
before giving up.
One control is the amount of time each single RPC call waits before giving up. This timeout is set
by the rpc_timeout option. Legal values are 0 through 9. The default value is 5, which
corresponds to about 30 seconds for the UDP protocol. Each value doubles the time of the preceding
value (i.e., a value of 4 is about 15 seconds).
Another control is the number of times a target agent attempts to reconnect to the source agent
after an rpc_timeout has detected a lost connection source during an installation of a fileset.
The number of retry attempts is controlled by the retry_rpc option. The range of values is 0
134 Reliability and Performance