Hi,
there's a bit of info on the blog entry referenced in the other thread -
http://blog.morpheus.co.uk/blog/blog.nsf/dx/banish-the-rational-installation-blues.htm.
We have all our installations for Rational products from v7.0 onwards in the repository including RBD, RDi, Rational Application Developer, Rational Functional Tester and so on. We keep an up to date version of Installation Manager itself so we can do automatic upgrades on that. We've also got install packages for the test environments of Websphere v6, v6.1 and v7.0.
Biggest benefit for me is when we install one of the apps, we get the latest version from the repository with all fixpacks etc. already applied rather than installing the base product and then applying a myriad of patches.
Using the utility means we only download the fixpacks once (into the repository using the update tool) and they're immediately available to all the developers.
Of course it also means we've got all the installations in one place so there's no more hunting around network drives for the latest version of the products we use. We've got the repository exposed througn an HTTP server and after we've installed and configured Installation Manager, a developer has everything they need to install the packages they need.
I've included some internal notes from our development Wiki below...
Andy
From our development Wiki...
The IBM Packaging Utility (PU) is used to manage an installation repository of Rational (v7.x and upwards) products for use by the IBM Installation Manager (IM) as described in Rational Software Installation.
IBM PU can be used to :
- import installation packages from Rational installation media,
- import installation packages from other installation repositories,
- check for and download updates to packaged products.
IBM PU is currently installed on <internal info removed>.
Import from downloaded Installation Media
* Extract the installation media to disk1, disk2, etc.
* Open PU and select Copy Packages
* Select Open Repository... and navigate to disk1 of your installation media.
* For Rational products you will normally find a diskTag.inf file.
* You should now find a new repository with the name as the disk location.
* Expand it and you should see the products available to be copied.
* Follow the wizard selections to copy the packages into our repository.
Import from another repository
I have found that IBM maintain a number of public repositories that can be used to import packages into our repository. These are the ones that get used to provide the update facility. The product installations are trial versions so we need to make sure we can get licences for these but there are some useful ones for some of the utilities.
The root of the repository is
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/rationalsdp/. You can browse around there to find all the various versions of the products. The useful ones are below.
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/rationalsdp/v7/im/ - contains the versions of Installation Manager. Storing this in the repository allows IM to update itself when it is managing updates or new installations. I have found that the Check for Updates option in PU does not work for IM itself, so best to keep an eye on this repository for new updates.
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/rationalsdp/v7/pu/ - contains the versions of the Packaging Utility. As with IM, the Check for updates option doesn't seem to work very well at the moment.
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/rationalsdp/v75 - as well as the v7.5 versions of the Rational products, IBM have started to add packaged options of the WAS Test environments for Rational, updated to the latest patches. There are options for was60, was61 and was70. These have now been copied into our repository, will see how it goes with updates.
Checking for Updates
This is done in PU by using the Copy Packages option and expanding our repository (<internal info removed>).
The operation can be a little flaky, I'm hoping it will be improved over time.
Best way seems to be to:
* select the particular version of the product you want to check for update (tick in the box),
* then make sure it is highlighted by selecting the text,
* you can now use the Check for Updates button.
* If a patch or other updates is found, a new item will be added to the tree view with details of what the patch is.
* You can now select this and follow the normal Copy procedure. It will look like your source and target repositories are the same, but this is not quite true - just a user interface thing.
