We want to use NS to install/upgrade various NetBackup components on both UNIX and Windows platforms. We've created the scripts and can create the packages without any great problem. However we need to pass information to those scripts that is specific to a server, or to a set of servers. We would make the collection match what we are doing, one server or several.
For example we might need to pass the licence key text for a NetBackup Agent - it is a long text string specific to an individual server. In other cases we want to pass a site code from which the script works out what NetBackup domain it is in and configures the install appropriately - that could apply to a collection of several servers. For some complex installs there is more information than we would like to pass on a command line.
I looked at the ability to define a whole set of different Programs for a package, each with the specific licence key on the command line - it would be a pain to define a program just to pass a licence key, as we would have to create a separate program for every Task we wanted to deploy. I reckon that the team that create Packages are not the same team as deploy them, so it would create co-ordination problems.
I can see that for a Task one can define the 'Agent display name' or 'Agent display description' and maybe we could subvert that as a means to pass task-specific information to the install scripts - but I don't know if that information can be accessed by the running script on the target system.
The other approach is to build a text configuration file into the package, and have Task-specific packages, each of which has the same common components, together with a unique configuration file (like an .ini or .conf file).
I guess the last approach I can think of is for the package to directly look for a configuration file over the network at run time, but again we cannot pass a 'change control number' to it unless it can read the 'Agent display name' or 'Agent display description' - we need something so the install script can select which configuration file at a know UNC path it should read. This would not work for any of our systems behind firewalls.
Can anyone suggest how to solve this? Surely many people need to pass license keys strings to Tasks - I've seen some discussion in the forum about MS Office but that is clearly specific to the vendor's msi - I need something much more general.