HP Systems Insight Manager 5.2 Update 2 Technical Reference Guide

Tool filtering
Tool filtering is a facility enabling the tool writer to control whether the tool should be executed on a selected
system. Most tools are platform dependent in that their successful execution depends on commands that are
provided on some platforms but not on others. For example, the bdf tool depends on the bdf command,
which is provided on HP-UX platforms, but is not available under that name on Linux platforms. A tool should
only be visible in the Tools menu when there is at least one discovered system that passes the filter
requirements. A discovered system must pass the filter requirements and is executed only if all the filter
requirements are passed. To do this, the tool specifies in a system filter expression the system attributes that
must be possessed by all systems it can run on.
NOTE: If a tool cannot be launched for selected systems, an error message is displayed with information
about why the tool cannot be launched.
The system attributes required for a tool to run are specified by system filter expressions having the form:
<node-filter name="attribute-name" operator="eq"
value="attribute-value" />
or
<node-filter name="attribute-name" operator="ge"
value="attribute-value" />
or
<node-filter name="attribute-name" operator="lt"
value="attribute-value" />
or
<node-filter name="attribute-name" operator="ct"
value="attribute-value" />
or
<node-filter name="attribute-name" operator="neq"
value="attribute-value" />
or
<node-filter name="attribute-name" operator="nct"
value="attribute-value" />
The eq operator specifies that the system on which the tool can run must have exactly the attribute value
specified. It applies to any attribute name allowed in a system filter expression. The ge operator specifies
that a system on which the tool can run on must have at least the attribute value specified. The lt and ge
operators can only be used with revision attributes, specifically OSRevision in the OS type filter and all of
the attributes of the Protocol type filter. The value of these attributes can be numeric or can be character
strings. The ct operator specifies that a system on which the tool can run on must have an attribute that
contains the value specified. The neq operator specifies that a system on which the tool can run on must not
have the exact attribute value specified. It applies to any attribute name allowed in a system filter expression.
The nct operator specifies that a system on which the tool can run on must have the attribute that does not
contain the value specified. For systems, the numeric valued attributes the filter expression can specify include
the OSRevision and Protocol Support attributes, whose values are version numbers. The values permitted for
version numbers and how they are compared is described in the Version Numbers in the following section.
The attribute-name is one of the values listed in the tables in the following section, or a protocol name from
the ProtocolSupport attribute of a system. The attribute-value is one of the possible system attribute values
for attribute-name.
Attribute values are based on the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model
(CIM). Usually these values are defined during the system identification process, which uses WBEM and
SNMP to determine system attributes. For this release, valid OSName values are HP-UX and Linux. For an
OSName value of HP-UX, the OSRevision attribute values have the leading alphabetic field removed (for
example B.11.11 is stored as 11.11).
Custom tools 339