A customer asked if there is any documentation on using a fixlet to install individual
device drivers using IEM. Customer does not want to use OSD or OSD Bare Metal Imaging component.
At this moment, customer does not actually have a specific device driver to deploy but just gathering information to see if IEM can actually deploy device drivers without using the binding feature from OSD component.
Do device drivers need to be in a specific format, can they be deployed / uninstalled?
Does IBM have any documentation on this device driver management topic?
I have suggested customer these two options below.
Create your own fixlet or task to execute such action on the target machine. You could either find one of exiting fixlets or tasks that performs similar action, then make a copy of it and change the action scripts to do what you would like.
or
Use the Software Distribution component to build your own SWD package and install it.
Any further suggestions or comments about this topic?
Yes you can install drivers using BigFix without using OSD. This is the method that I prefer to use. One of the reasons is that doing so outside of OSD means you can update drivers on both new and existing machines using the same fixlets and tasks.
This is really only going to work if network drivers are already in place. If the network drivers are not present, then you are going to have trouble getting BigFix to be able to do anything at all.
Assuming Network drivers are present, then all other drivers can be deployed through BigFix.
I don’t use SWD for this, or for anything really, but that is personal preference.
If the hardware in question is Dell OEM hardware, then you can use Dell Command Update to install Dell Driver Packs dynamically with BigFix, no special coding required. I already have examples of this on BigFix.Me
As far as just installing any driver, you figure out how to install the driver on the command line, then you replicate that with BigFix. This is basically how you do everything with BigFix.
You can use relevance to only install the driver if it is not already installed, but if you deploy using this method on all systems, then it will install the driver everywhere. You could also only deploy the driver on systems that have compatible hardware IDs present on the physical system, but this involves much more complicated relevance. Model specific Driver Pack deployment is a bit easier.
I have examples of how to install just any random driver on BigFix.Me
I just remembered, there is a slight workaround for this.
You can try to include all the major network drivers that might be missing from the OS, but incase you have a system that is lacking, you can use the following:
There are only a few chipsets for USB to Ethernet Adapters. It is pretty easy to include about 4 different drivers and cover about 95% of the USB to Ethernet Adapters in existence from all brands. If you have these drivers included, then you can use one of these adapters at image time to get around the problem on affected systems.
This USB to Ethernet adapter workaround also works great when you have DHCP tied to MAC address registration and you don’t yet know the MAC address of the new device.