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Network and Identity Configurator for Linux
A tool that enables easy changing of the system name and network address of Linux systems and IBM middleware.
Date Posted: November 18, 2004
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NICL provides a simple and direct method for changing a Linux system's name and networking characteristics. It can also locate and change this information for many different IBM middleware installations. This greatly reduces the time required for cloning pre-built system images. NICL can change a system's name and address, including the middleware componants, in roughly 30 minutes, whereas a full installation of the operating system and several middleware componants and related patches and updates can easily take several days.
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NICL is of greatest value for situations where you need to have multiple machines of a similar configuration. Classroom and other training settings are a classic example. VMware is another example of how using NICL can greatly improve efficiency. We build a base VMware guest system and archive it. We then add various middleware componants on top of that base. At any time, we can activate an archived image and reprovision it with a new name and IP address on the fly. This allows us to quickly develop and test new applications on multiple different systems configurations.
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NICL was written expressly for Linux environments. There is an effort under way to provide a PERL version of NICL that should work in both Linux and Windows environments. There is no
anticipated release date for that version.
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NICL supports command line arguments for all the configuration options. Running "nicl --help" will display the options and sample usage. Part of our activation process is to call NICL remotely form the VMware ESX console. This consists of extracting the desired image, registering and starting the guest image, then making an Secure Shell (SSH) call to NICL on the guest system. A sample command call is "ssh root@base.ti.ibm.com "/opt/IBM/bin/nicl --name test12 -ipaddr 9.33.44.55". This assumes that you have trusted hosts configured in the guest, which is questionably dangerous, but we are in an isolated test environment.
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If you have DB2 installed with instance(s) other than the default "db2inst1," you will need to use the "--db2instances" command line argument, providing the instance names as a space
separated list (that is, /nicl --db2instances "inst1 inst2" ...).
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You have a few options here. Assuming everything was changed properly, but you entered a wrong value, just re-run NICL and supply the correct values the second time. You may also want to have NICL recover the changes back to the oringal state using the "--restore" option. Note that if you changed the system name, then any directories that were changed will not be restored and will have to be renamed manually. The final option is to restore the system from the back-up you made prior to running NICL the first time. (You did make a full system back-up, didn't you?)
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