How to use DCU on Dell Client Command Suite - Part 2

Now let's go ahead and start with the install of Dell Repository Manager. So to install it I have a server up here in my environment. I'm going to open up Internet Explorer on my server and I'm going to go to dell.com slash command. And just like last time I'll select update but this time I'll select Dell Repository Manager. So now let's go ahead and open up Dell Repository Manager. So here I already have a server in my domain with Dell Repository Manager installed. I'm going to click the start menu and I'm going to run the business client version of Dell Repository Manager. The business client version contains all of the drivers for your Dell Optiplex latitude precision and rugged hardware. I'll go ahead and select accept to accept the security cert from Dell Repository Manager. So here in the business client version of Dell Repository Manager I can create my application bundles and whitelist for my Dell Optiplex latitude rugged and precision hardware. You can see here there's really two steps to getting started and it lays it out pretty well. The first step is to populate your database. In this step you're basically creating a local database or a local copy of the Dell online catalog. This is what you're going to use to create your repository or your whitelist of what drivers, buyers, and firmware are needed for your environment. To do that we're going to select on sync database with online catalog. Okay it's now going to go online, download the catalog, read the catalog, and create your own internal database. The database has been populated, the window kind of closed, so the next step is to create a repository. So we're going to go ahead and select create a new repository. Here we'll give it a name. I usually like to use the date and year so I'm going to say 2020 underscore 01 client repository and then I'll select next. Our base repository is going to be the online catalog we just created. If you want to use a previous catalog for your base you can here but I always use the Dell online catalog to make sure that I'm getting the newest updates directly from Dell. So we'll go ahead and select next now. So here I have the options of selecting which brands I want to support. For my environment right now we're just doing the Optiplex 7050 so I'll select Optiplex and next. Here I can bring in the drivers for every model of Optiplex but since I'm only running the 7050 I'm going to go ahead and scroll down and select the 7050. My advice when you're creating your own repositories for your environment only select the brand and models that are in your environment. Otherwise these repositories can get kind of large because there are a lot of models out there and we want to make sure that we only eat up the disk space we need for the models in your environment. Now that I've selected my model I'll go ahead and select next again. Here I have the option to add in any updates that are not listed in the repository. We don't want to do that here so we'll go ahead select next again and finish. Now using those settings I made it's going to go ahead and create a repository that contains all of the updates for the Dell Optiplex 7050 that have been published and released ever. So you can see here it's 165 components or 165 updates for the Optiplex 7050. Now that it's done let's go ahead and select close. And perfect it's loaded our client repository. So to make this a little easier to see I'm going to go ahead and blow this up. But now you can see that I have drivers, applications, everything that has ever been released for that system. Here's firmware if I keep going I'll find BIOS but everything's listed here. Over on the left I can filter out anything I want so if I didn't want to support applications for instance I could select drivers, firmware, and BIOS. And then listed here you'll notice that those applications went away. If I wanted to come down to criticality and only do the the urgent I could select urgent. And I've taken my list down from 165 over here to 25. So you have full ability to really filter this down for what you want. For my environment I usually select all the criticalities for drivers, firmware, and BIOS. So once that's done I'm ready to create my catalog. So the save repository window has popped up. So the first thing we're going to do is put in a location to save our repository to. So I'm going to select browse and up here I'm going to put in my FQDN share. So unitedtest.net update source dollar and create the catalog.xml file. The next option I have is what do I want to save. I can save either a catalog file or a full repository. If I select catalog file it's going to publish out a whitelist of all of the drivers, BIOS, and firmware that I've approved for my environment. When the Dell Command Update Systems run their check for updates against my whitelist they'll get the instructions of what to download and install but then go to dell.com to install If I wanted to create my whitelist but also control the traffic so they all go to a DFS share I could do that off of full repository. So with the full repository I'm creating my whitelist but I'm also creating a local install source of all the install media that is necessary. For my environment I'll go ahead and select full repository and save. So now that we've selected to run the catalog it's going to build the job and export it out to the jobs queue. So down here if I select jobs queue you're going to see that it's exporting the repository and it's at three percent. At this point it may be worth to take a break go get a cup of coffee because it's going to start downloading 165 updates. Okay the repository downloaded so we see that it's completely full at 100 percent. So at this point we're done with repository manager. We have created our repository so if I come back out to our file share you'll see that in the update source we now have all of our install media and folders and if I scroll all the way down you'll see our catalog xml. So now we've created our catalog let's go back to our update client. So we're going to remote back into our Optiplex 7050 and we're going to relaunch Dell command to update. But this time instead of saying check for updates to the Dell cloud we're going to actually check for updates to our update source. So over here in the gear icon we'll come in we're going to select the gear to go into the settings make this a little bit bigger so we can all see and instead of going to the Dell support site for our update source location we're going to select browse and we're going to go to the repository we just made. So put in the server name server share and we're going to scroll down to the catalog and open then add and you now see the Dell update catalog is here. So we'll select okay check and now it's going to check the Dell update catalog that we have internally instead of the Dell catalog we have published online. So at this point it's the same exact user experience. It's going to create the inventory xml file determine what updates are needed compared to the catalog we published come back tell us that there's some differences and give us the option to install them.