After installing the product or after installing maintenance packages, you can use the installation verification utility (IVU) to compute checksums of the installed file set to verify the checksum against the checksum in the product bill of materials.
Installing the product also installs the IVU, which is the installver command-line tool.
This topic describes using the installver command to compute a checksum on the installed files and compare the checksum to the product bill of materials. The IVU tool is installed during the installation of the following product components:
You can also use the IVU to compute a new checksum for a system after you make significant configuration changes. The installver tool computes a new baseline checksum for each file in the inventory of a configured system to use to identify file changes in the later comparisons. Such a comparison is useful for detecting file tampering on the configured system, for example.
You can use the new checksums to compare installations on
multiple systems. The following graphic illustrates the main use-cases where
you can perform product verification at any point of the product life-cycle
or use the inventory file, which is part of the baseline checksum feature,
to provide full-file verification of a configured system.
Although the most common use of the tool is to compare the product bill of materials to the installed file set after installation or after installing maintenance, other tasks are also possible.
See Verifying against the bill of materials for more information.
See Computing a new baseline checksum for an inventory of configured files for more information.
See Excluding files from a checksum comparison for more information.
See Comparing specific file and component checksums for more information.
See Changing the default message digest algorithm for more information.
See Handling out-of-memory situations for more information.
See Verifying the installver command for more information.
When you are satisfied that your installed or updated file set matches the product bill of materials, you are finished installing and verifying the product or updating and verifying the product. IBM Support has documents and tools that can save you time gathering information needed to resolve problems. If you detect a problem, before opening a problem report see if the problem is a known problem by checking the Support page:
The IVU performs the tasks using the logic described
in the following graphic:
After verifying your installation, you can create profiles or deploy an application on an existing application server profile.
After installing, updating, and verifying, the next step is to use the product. If you created a stand-alone application server or a cell, start the application server, or the deployment manager, nodeagent, and federated application server, to use the administrative console to deploy an existing application. See Fast paths for WebSphere Application Server for more information.
If
you have not yet created a cell profile, a deployment manager profile, or
a stand-alone application server profile, go to Creating and deleting profiles to
see how to create a profile.