HP Insight Control Software for Linux User Manual

Page 100

The general use of the Custom or Other installation tool is not officially supported because you,
and not Insight Control for Linux, must manage most of the boot and installation process. Also the
agents that HP SIM requires for long term monitoring and manageability of your managed systems
are not provided in SPPs or PSPs and thus are not installed automatically.

The purpose of the Custom or Other installation tool is to provide you with the ability to extend the
capabilities of Insight Control for Linux beyond the officially supported operating systems installed
by the supported OS installation tools.

Because a managed system that is installed through the Custom or Other installation tool does not
include the required SPP or PSP agents, HP recommends that you use static IP addresses (configured
in the OS or by

DHCP

) to allow HP SIM to, at a minimum, maintain a relationship between the

server and its discovered entry in the All Systems collection (and others).

Here are the steps you need to take to install a variant of Linux OS on a managed system. For
additional information, see the white paper titled Installing a Custom Operating System with Insight
Control for Linux.
1.

Options

→IC-Linux→Manage Repository....

For information on registering an OS, see

Registering operating systems (page 47)

Registering a custom OS automatically creates three directories in the Insight Control for Linux
Repository:

•

/opt/repository/instconfig/custom/MyOS

•

/opt/repository/custom/MyOS

•

/opt/repository/boot/MyOSBoot

Where MyOS is the name of the custom OS.

Copy the operating system files and boot files into the newly-created directories. For more
information, see

Copying a custom OS into the repository (page 56)

Create the following scripts, as needed:

Description

Script

Required for an unattended installation, this script performs macro substitution so
that a working copy of your installation configuration file has the actual values
required for your installation.

auto_config

This script constructs a boot stanza that specifies your kernel and RAM disk, which
enables your boot loader to boot your custom OS.

boot_stanza

This script is required for an unattended installation and for an interactive
installation that uses virtual media to boot, because the target system's static IP
address needs to be specified in the kernel parameters.

This script accepts a password from StdIn and outputs the encrypted password
through StdOut, allowing you to encrypt the root password of the target server
for an unattended installation.

encrypt_passwd

This script is used for an installation using virtual media that requires additional
files, in addition to the kernel and RAM disk, to boot.An ESXi OS is an eample
of an operating system that requires additional files to boot.

extra_files

This script is used expressly for an installation using virtual media where the OS
requires an alternate directory structure.

create_iso

Insight Control for Linux provides example auto_config, boot_stanza, and
encrypt_passwd

scripts for the CentOS 5 and Debian 5 operating systems; they are located

in the /opt/repository/instconfig/custom/examples/ directory in the subdirectories
named for the OS. HP recommends that you use these examples as templates for your own
scripts.

100 Installing operating systems on managed systems