Network Installation Management Guide and Reference

Using Client Machines as Resource Servers

Any machine in the NIM environment can be a resource server. In simple environments, the NIM master is usually used to serve all the NIM resources.

Defining resources on client machines can be beneficial for the following reasons:

• Disk space limitations on the NIM master may prohibit the storage of all the resources on a single machine.
• Resource usage may be heavy, and communications and data access bottlenecks could occur if all the resources were served by a single machine.

  For example, if you use NIM to install 200 machines on 5 different subnets, you could have a set of resources created and available on each subnet. Each set of resources would be used to install the machines on the same subnet. In addition to distributing the workload among several resource servers, this would also reduce the network traffic across the gateways between the different subnets.

From Web-based System Manager

1. Select the Resources container.
2. From the Resources menu, select New Resources.
3. Follow the wizard instructions to create the resource.

From SMIT

1. To create a resource on a NIM client, enter the smit nim_mkres fast path.
2. Select the Resource Type.
3. In the displayed dialog fields, supply the correct values for the resource options. Be sure to specify the name of the client machine for the Server of the Resource field. Use the help information or the LIST option to help you. All attributes specified when the resource is defined (such as location and source) must be local to the server machine.

From the Command Line

To create a resource on a NIM client, specify the client's NIM name for the server attribute when defining the resource.

Example:

To create an lpp_source resource named images2 from a CD on the NIM client machine, client_mac1, in the /resources/images directory, enter:

nim -o define -t lpp_source -a
server=client_mac1 \
-a location=/resources/images -a source=/dev/cd0 images2