HOWTO: Install IBM Director Client v4.11

[Ausmith1]

IBM Director comes "free" with each IBM xSeries server and is a useful monitoring and remote diagnostic tool unless you want to spend serious money on the likes of Tivoli or MOM.

IBM were nice enough to even make and include a well documented silent mode options file (diragent.rsp) for Director v4.11, yet if you try to install "System Health Monitoring" it will halt in the middle of the install and say that the file SYSHEA~1.cab is needed. What happens is that the original 3KB SYSHEA~1.cab is overwritten during the installation of other components by an empty 60KB version of SYSHEA~1.cab.

Setting the state of SYSHEA~1.cab to read-only did nothing to prevent this happening so I simply used cacls to set it to "really read-only and I mean it this time!"

That worked :-)

Modify the \Director\Agent\Windows\i386\diragent.rsp file to install the options you want or need.

@ECHO Extract IBM Director v4.11 - 7-Zip SFX used to save disk space
C:\Temp\Apps\Director\Agent\IBMDirectorAgent.exe -y

@ECHO Set read-only permissions on SYSHEA~1.cab
echo y|cacls C:\Temp\Apps\Director\Agent\SYSHEA~1.cab /P Everyone:R

@ECHO Install IBM Director v4.11
IF EXIST C:\Temp\Apps\Director\Agent\IBMSetup.Exe START "" /WAIT C:\Temp\Apps\Director\Agent\IBMSetup.Exe unattended waitforme