Edit: Still good stuff.
Originally posted May 27, 2014 on AIXchange
Recently, a customer wanted to remove a client from its original NIM master server and add it to a new, just-installed NIM master server.
The comments made to this post reminded me of the niminit command:
A quick recap on how to register and initialize clients to the master.
On the master, make sure the clients are allowed to register themselves. This is the default from master installation.
Make sure the clients are in /etc/hosts.
There are also other things to make sure that comms can happen, like the /etc/hosts.equiv file…
If you can ssh to and from the master and client, then generally this is fine.
Make sure the client does not have the master software/filesets installed:
lslpp -vl | grep -i nim
check for “bos.sysmgt.nim.master 6.1.6.0 COMMITTED Network Install Manager ” and if it exist, remove it with:
installp -ug bos.sysmgt.nim.master
On the client do this:
(if the client was registered previously and the niminfo file exist)
rm /etc/niminfo
niminit -a name= -a master= -a connect=nimsh (this will build the niminfo file and register the client)
nimclient -p (permit the master to do work on the client)
nimclient -C (disable cryptographic thingy)
nimclient -l (to establish a task was successfully done by getting nim master info as output)
Now you can work on the client.
Once we removed the /etc/niminfo file and ran niminit, and we got up and running on the new NIM master server.
On another NIM topic, Waldemar Mark Duszyk wrote about removing NIM clients from NIM master servers.
I have not done any patching for a while and today, when I had to remove a nim client definition I could not remember the second command to use. Now, I do so here it is for the record the process:
First, reset the client
# nim -F -o reset NIM_CLIENT_NAME
Now, remove all associated with the client resources.
# nim -o deallocate -a subclass=all NIM_CLIENT_NAME
At this stage the client can be removed.
# nim -o remove -F NIM_CLIENT_NAME
the NIM_CLIENT_NAME is the hostname of the client to be removed.
Feel free to share your own useful NIM tips and tricks in the comments.