Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.
My name is Dustin. I am a subject matter expert in the systems management space. Today, I will be going over catalog basics using Dell Repository Manager. The catalog is an XML file that maps system updates for certain system types and operating systems. We can find the catalog options for Repository Manager just by clicking here in the drop-down and choosing Application Preferences, and then choosing Catalogs.
What we will see here is our Enterprise Server Catalog and our Index Catalog, and both of these are at the latest version. Dell Repository Manager by default automatically downloads and updates the new catalog when it’s available, so it’s really not a thing you should have to do here, but it’s definitely something to go check and make sure that it is indeed at the latest. So, let’s talk a little bit more about the catalog itself.
Where is the catalog itself hosted? It’s hosted on downloads.dell.com/catalog. What we see here is a number of catalogs, but the main one you want to get is the XML.GZ. If we download that and extract it, what we have is a catalog.xml, and that’s actually what our applications such as Dell Repository Manager and OpenManage Enterprise are consuming to find what updates are applicable for certain devices based on what OS they are running. So, let’s go ahead and look at this catalog itself. I already have it open in Notepad++. Let’s talk about the structure of it.
The first thing I want to talk about is the base location. Where are we getting all of our files from? For us, it’s downloads.dell.com. Secondly, we want to look at what protocol we’re using. How are we connecting to downloads.dell.com? In this case, it is HTTPS. With that, we can also look at one other thing which is pretty important: what version. As you can see, the version of the catalog that I downloaded is actually older than the one that’s in the Repository Manager, and that’s simply because I already had it set up for staging.
The newest version would have the newer version listed here. So, with that said, let’s talk about a couple more things. System bundles: the catalog separates everything into their own little bundles. The bundle is basically based on system type and the operating system. I want to look at one that has a better example of things underneath it. So, we’ll start here with the T130. Our bundle is Windows 64-bit on a PowerEdge T130. That is what we are identifying. These are all the packages that are applicable for that bundle.
This can be very helpful. Let’s suppose you’re in a situation where a user says, “I’ve set up the Repository Manager. I’ve tried to grab inventory from one of my iDRACs, and my iDRAC says that I should be having inventory for, sake of argument, SAS drive firmware. I’m supposed to have this F8V3R available, but it’s not showing. It’s not showing up. What’s going on?” That’s when you could go to the catalog and see if it’s even there. Does it exist in the catalog? Because it has to exist there first for the rest of it to see it, and that’s just a good way to figure that out. The next thing I want to talk about is a software component.
Once you actually find the software component, for example, we’re going to say SAS drive firmware, this is where you can find out where it actually lives. Let’s suppose that we set up the catalog in Dell Repository Manager. Dell Repository Manager says, “Yes, this is one of the updates that we need, and this is where it’s located.” Then, once you actually go try to create your SUU or run your update itself, it doesn’t work. It fails. It’s going to fail possibly because maybe it actually doesn’t live here like it should.
So, that’s one of the things you have to go check. You have to go to download.dell.com, HTTPS, and then plug in this path to make sure that it does actually exist. If it does exist, then you know we’re good. If it does not exist, then it’s time to escalate and figure out why. Another important thing to see in here is “Reboot Required.” This is, uh, we all, I mean, a lot of customers are going to want to know this, so that’s good to know where that flag is set. And that’s really pretty much it for that.
It tells you the supported systems, what the vendor version is, and that’s pretty much all you need for catalogs. It’s somewhat straightforward. Once you understand the structure, you’re able to understand: does an update actually exist, where is it, all that type of good stuff. So, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed my video on catalog basics with Dell Repository Manager.
Thank you, and have a great day.
