Edit: I do not think I have run Firefox on AIX in a while, but I still do most things remotely. Mounting .iso images is more straightforward these days too.
Originally posted November 5, 2007 on AIXchange
I found myself hundreds of miles away from a new environment that needed to be set up. The machines were physically cabled to the network and everything was powered on. I was able to reach the HMC and from there I could power on LPARs, open console windows, and configure partitions. My options were to either find someone on site to be my hands and eyes and physically load media for me, or use the network myself. I chose to download the necessary AIX media onto my Network Installation Management (NIM) server so that I could configure my new lppsource.
Much of what follows assumes that you already know how to set up a NIM server and have ample free disk space. It’s also assumed that you have Entitled Software Support, a decent network connection to the Internet, etc.
First I went to the IBM Entitled Software Support page and downloaded my AIX CD images.
I ran the Firefox Web browser on AIX in a VNC session on my server, and from that connection I downloaded my images directly onto the machine I was working on. I had local copies of the CDs, but the network pipe from my location wouldn’t support copying them directly from my machine to the target machine. Downloading them directly to my NIM server was a better use of the network in this case.
Once I downloaded the images, I needed to mount the CDs so that I could run the smitty bffcreate command.
On Linux, I can simply run:
mount -o loop -t iso9660 filename.iso /mnt/iso
This mounts my CD image on my filesystem. On AIX, mounting an .iso image is a little more involved. First I created my logical volume, in this case:
/usr/sbin/mklv -y’testlv’ datavg 6
Then I ran the dd command in order to write the contents of the .iso file to my logical volume:
dd if=/aixcd1.iso of=/dev/testlv bs=10M
Then I mounted my .iso image with:
mount -v cdrfs -o ro /dev/testlv /mnt/iso
At this point the CD was mounted, and I could run smitty bffcreate.
Once I’d used bffcreate to get my images into the correct directory, I could create my lppsource and move forward with my NIM procedures.
Depending on disk space issues, you may find that you need to remove .iso images as you download them. In any event, this procedure saved me from taking physical media onsite and allowed me to keep the project moving forward from my remote location.