HP 705 Workstation, User Reference

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Introduction
This manual describes the features of Hewlett Packard’s System
Configuration Repository (SCR) for HP-UX and how to use them.
Although powerful, SCR is simple to use, if you have a basic
understanding of the HP-UX command syntax.
• Chapter 2 describes how to use SCR commands to configure the
program for operation. This is all you need to do to begin tracking
changes in your system quickly and easily.
• Chapter 3 describes the full capabilities of all 10 SCR commands.
The best way to learn SCR’s capabilities is to experiment with the
commands. SCR does not change any system configurations. Using a
command incorrectly may give you some error messages or strange
information, but it will not harm your system.
SCR Features
SCR provides the following time-saving features:
• SCR can extract a static “snapshot” of a system's configuration by
request or by schedule, and store it in the persistent repository. A
snapshot is a record of a system’s configuration at a specific time.
• SCR snapshots stored in the repository can be compared with each
other to identify any differences.
• SCR configuration snapshots include all relevant configuration
information included in the Management Information Format (MIF)
for the Desktop Management Interface (DMI). See the DMI User’s
Reference for information about DMI and the MIF.
SCR shows you quickly what is going on in a system. As root user, you
can enter a command to learn the current status of a particular system
or an entire set of systems. With options to that command, you can
learn what changes have taken place recently. If desired, these com-
mands will execute according to a schedule and automatically generate
reports. By monitoring changes in a set of similarly configured systems,
SCR can give you advance warning of potential problems.
Using SCR, you can retrieve a snapshot and compare it to a previous
snapshot. This may reveal things that are going wrong in a system but
not generating error messages. SCR uses DMI programming routines to
gather information from systems. Be sure DMI is running and
managing each node for which you want a snapshot. See the DMI 2.0
User’s Reference for DMI installation and configuration instructions.