What's good about CheckSysConf? Plenty!

23 Jul 2008 • 3 minute read

While I suspect that many of our customers have used or heard about the CheckSysConf utility, there may be a few that have no idea how it can help them determine potential Cadence software problems before contacting Cadence Customer Support. More important, CheckSysConf provides information on how to resolve OS/patch issues.

CheckSysConf is a tool that verifies whether the machine on which you want to run the Cadence tools has the required system configuration and OS patches. This tool is available for Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and LINUX platforms.

CheckSysConf Syntax

The syntax for running CheckSysConf is as follows:

checkSysConf release [options]

where options can be a combination of one or more of the following:

Option	Description
`release`	Checks an OS configuration and patch list file located at `your_inst_dir/share/patchData/platform type/OS/release` for the required system configuration and patches for the Cadence product specified in `release`.
`-c`	Checks all existing data files for possible platform/OS conflicts. This option identifies if patches required in one release are known-problem patches in another release.
`-h`	Prints the help message.
`-r`	Returns the releases supported in the data directory. The output of this option represents the only valid `release` option.
`-v`	Returns the release version of this script.
`-i`	Suppresses title and other additional information output.
`-l`	Prints the patch data file associated with `platform/OS/release`.
`-q`	Executes the script silently and outputs only `PASS` or `FAIL`. This switch will have no effect if used in conjunction with the `-l` or `-p` option.
`-d` `dir`	Provides the patch data from the path specified in the `directory`. The leading portion of the directory can be any valid path, but the last directory in the path must be named `patchData`.
`-p patch`	Prints the names of Cadence products that require this patch.
`-noDISPLAY`	Allows skipping of the display test, even if there is a DISPLAY requirement in the data file. This argument should be used when running the tool on a remote host, where it is not possible to ascertain the display configuration (or it may not even have one). Using the `-noDISPLAY` argument prevents a false fail in these circumstances.

Note: The output is saved in the /tmp/checkSysConf.<hostname>-<date>.log file.

You need to have root privileges in order to uses the full functionality of this tool on HP-UX. This is not a requirement for Solaris, AIX or Linux.

Examples

Example 1

checkSysConf ABC10

Determines if the machine has the correct configuration and patches for the ABC10 release.

Example 2

checkSysConf ABC10 -d /hm/aoyon/my_patches/patchData

Determines if this workstation has the correct configuration and patches for IC443 based on the patch data files found in the data directory /hm/aoyon/my_patches/patchData. The specified directory must end with the patchData directory, such as /hm/aoyon/my_patches/patchData.

Example 3

checkSysConf ABC10 -p 109147

Queries the data file to determine which Cadence products require a particular patch. This feature allows users or system administrators to ignore a failure if the indicated product is not in use.

Example 4

checkSysConf ABC10 -q

Runs the script silently from another script, which verifies the PASS or FAIL output.

For a full description, you can review the CheckSysConf details in the Cadence Help documentation or on SourceLink. Click here to access that page.

If you have any questions or suggested enhancements for CheckSysConf, please let me know

Jerry GenPart