Creating Appliances › Install and Configure Appliances

Install and Configure Appliances

There are two key steps here. First, get the software you want to install to the appliance boot volume. Second, install and configure the software.

To install and configure the appliance

1. Copy the software distribution (for example, rpm) that you will install to the CA 3Tera AppLogic controller volume (for example, in your home directory).
2. Start the test application.
3. Find the IP address of your appliance's default interface (use the component info shell command)
4. Using scp (SSH-based secure copy), copy the software distribution to the appliance. Verify you are using the private SSH key for the copy (appliances don't allow password based logins). Also consider the following points:
   • Use the IP address found in the previous step as IP of the appliance
   • Example: scp myfiles.tar.gz root@10.50.12.14:/usr/local
   • If you are not running ssh-agent, you will want to specify the appliances private key file (-i rsa_appliance option after scp)
5. Login to the appliance through SSH (using the SSH command from the controller shell).
6. Install the software on the appliance
7. Configure the software, instrument any configuration files (see Class Editor and ADL Property Markup).

   Note: If your appliance has heavy incoming UDP traffic (for example, VoIP appliance), read the note at SCR 487 to avoid excessive packet drop.

8. Verify that the appliance works when started from scratch (stop the application and restart it, see everything starts and works properly).
9. (Optional) Run prelink and rpmpkgs to pre-link any new shared objects and record the installed RPM versions, respectively. If you expect to be logged in to the appliance frequently and need the locate command, run locate -u to update locate's index.

   Note: On regular Linux servers, these operations are performed periodically by a cron job; in CA 3Tera AppLogic appliances these cron jobs are disabled because the appliance installations don't change for catalog classes.

Alternate Methods for Acquiring the Software

There are other methods to get the software on to the appliance. Two of them are listed here:

• Having a (temporary) output on the appliance that is marked as a gateway output and is connected to a temporary instance of the NET gateway appliance. This way, you will have access to the Internet from the appliance and you can download various software packages directly from their distribution sites (for example, www.sourceforge.net, fedora.redhat.com, and so on). Don't forget to remove the temporary terminal from your appliance when done with the installation.
• Using the new vol manage command on the appliance boot volume. You can do this using the volume browser GUI only if the software you need to upload is 10MB or less. For larger software, you can use the volume manager shell. In the volume manager shell, you can use rsync to upload files to your volume.