AIXDownloadCacher getting IEM to recognized cached content

Usage and Config Patch
1 
  Trying to figure out how to use the AIXDownloadCacher.


  I have used it to download TL and Service packs to either create the .aix file, or the sha1 file.


  I copied the sha1 files into the bfmirror/downloads/sha1 folder


  BUT... when I run a fixlet to install one of the TL levels (e.g

7100-01-04) the BF Server is going out to the IBM Website and
downloading the content and then sending it to the agent running on the
AIX machine.

  How can I get my BF server to recognize that it already has the content?


  I am trying to figure out how this all works because i need to

setup an airgapped network and I will have to move the AIX/SHA1 files
over manually and I want to make sure they are picked up before I go
through the process of transferring all gigabytes of data

  Thanks,


  Lou
2

This is expected behavior. The AIX TL / SP fix pack is a collection of individual packages. The AIX Download Cacher will download each of these individual files and will optionally archive them into a single .aix file. Because the single file archive is dynamically generated at the time of downloading, we have no consistent checksum values used by the caching functionality of the the IEM server. There are currently two workarounds for this caching limitation.

(1) Store the individual packages in an NFS accessible directory and use the deploy via NFS option. Since AIX will automatically attempt to install the latest version of any filesets it finds in a specific directory, it is recommended that the files from a specific fix pack be issolated into their own directory.

This can be accomplished using the “Run Download Cacher Tool - AIX” task (ID 30) or it can be run manually with something similar to the following example.

AIXDownloadCacher.exe --fixid 6100-09-03 --dir C:\AIX_Files\6100-09-03 --repo C:\AIX_Files\61_AllFiles --no-archive

That will download the files for AIX fix pack 6100-09-03 to the --dir directory. The directory specified by the --repo parameter will be searched before attempting to download anything from the internet. Files found in the repo directory will be copied to the --dir directory. Any files not found in the repo directory will be download from the internet and added to both the repo directory and the --dir directory.

Additional information on using the AIX Download Cacher can be found at http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21506031

(2) Use the AIX Download Cacher to download the fix pack to a .aix archive and then upload this .aix file to the server using the AIX Deployment Wizard . This wizard will create a custom Fixlet that has a known checksum which can be utilized by the servers caching mechanism. Using this method will allow you to rename the .aix file to its sha1 value and manually copy it to the servers cache directory.

Additional information on using the AIX Deployment Wizard to create a custom fixlet can be found at http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS63NW_9.1.0/com.ibm.tivoli.tem.doc_9.1/Patch_Man/Patch_Man_AIX/t_creating_fixlets_for_aix_package_updates.html?lang=en

1 Like
3

Thanks this significantly clarifies how the AIXDownloadCacher and the fixlets in the system work.

Question: Why would you ever use the -sha1 option on the AIXDownloadCacher command itself?

Question2: is he .aix file a known format like tar or zip?

4

It really does not serve any practical purpose and is mostly there for when we figure out a way around the caching issue.

The .aix extension was selected for the sake of helping to identify archives created by the AIX Download Cacher and does not have any relation to the type of archive. The download cacher uses the IEM tool, BFArchive to create the archive. Additional information can be found on the BFArchive github page: GitHub - bigfix/bfarchive: The bfarchive utility