Ignite-UX Overview

Ignite-UX is quite a versatile product. It has a great deal of functionality associated with it that would take an entire book to cover. I'll cover what I believe to be the two major functional areas of Ignite-UX that I see used. These are:

• Network installation of client, or target, systems from a server that has on it software depots. These depots are usually created by copying software from media into depots on the Ignite-UX server. This is somewhat the same as the software installation covered in Chapter 2, except that the software is on a server rather than media. There is also a Graphical User Interface that allows you to control this process from the server. This technique would allow you to select the specific software that you want to load on each individual client. You can either "push" software from the server to the client or "pull" software to the client from the server. In addition to creating software depots from media, you can create an operating system archive from a "golden image." The "golden image" is a perfectly running system that you wish to replicate to many systems. The make_sys_image command produces a compressed image of the "golden system." In this chapter we'll focus on the software depots created from copying media into depots on the server.

• Creating a bootable system recovery tape using make_tape_recovery . This feature allows you to create an image of your root volume on tape. You could later boot off of this tape and restore the root volume group and other volume groups directly from tape.

• Creating a network recovery archive using make_net_recovery . This allows you to have a centralized system on which all of your recovery archives are stored. You could later boot off of this network archive and restore your system.

Let's take a look at these three aspects of Ignite-UX in the upcoming sections. Be sure to check www.docs.hp.com to obtain some good documents available on Ignite-UX and www.software.hp.com to obtain the latest Ignite-UX software. Some of these documents have much more detail than I include in my upcoming "how to" sections.

I'll assume that you already have the Ignite-UX product loaded on your server system. This software comes bundled with HP-UX 11i, so it is just a matter of loading it on your server system from media. You can be sure you're getting the latest version of Ignite-UX if you download it from the software.hp.com Web site.