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Advanced information and use casesđź”—

Headless operationđź”—

On systems that lack a graphical environment or cannot run a HTML5-compliant browser, the Software Manager can either be controlled from the command line as described in the section Command line usage, or from the browser of another machine.

Suppose the Software Manager is running on a headless machine “tiny”, and you want to control it from a more capable machine “bigshot”:

  1. Log in on “tiny” and run the following command to start the SOM server:

    $HOME/MVTec/SoftwareManager/som --hostname tiny -n # start server on tiny

    The command line option --hostname tiny instructs the server to listen to other machines on the network, while -n prevents SOM from attempting to start a browser.

  2. On “bigshot”, enter the address displayed on the terminal of “tiny” in a browser. Ensure to copy the address including the unlock token.
    For more information about how to unlock the frontend, see Security.

Limitations of headless mode

The running SOM will not be able to gain admin privileges using Windows UAC or polkit.

Therefore, if you want the Software Manager to perform actions that require admin privileges in headless mode, start the Software Manager with these privileges.
On Linux-based systems, this can be done using sudo, and on Windows systems use Run as Administrator when starting the Software Manager.

Connecting through an HTTP proxyđź”—

On systems that do not support a direct connection to the internet, the Software Manager can be instructed to connect through an HTTP proxy.

  1. Start the Software Manager.
  2. Open the settings, enter the proxy’s server name in the HTTP Proxy field, and confirm your change with Enter.
  3. Restart the Software Manager for the changes to take effect.

Connecting HTTP proxies with authorizationđź”—

If your proxy requires authorization with a username and password, prefix the proxy entry with username:password@, for example: foo:secret@server:port.
Specifying the proxy this way will keep your password stored in the settings file. If this is undesirable, you can start a SOM session with a temporary proxy setting:

som -P http://foo:secret@server:port

You can also specify the proxy in an environment variable HTTP_PROXY, which is used if the HTTP Proxy field in the SOM settings is left empty: HTTP_PROXY=http://foo:secret@server:port

For proxies with NTLM authentication, we suggest installing a forwarding proxy, and specifying that proxy in the Software Manager.

flowchart LR
    A[MVTec Software Manager]
    B["Forwarding proxy (localhost:3128)"] 
    C["Corporate proxy server (proxy:3128)"]
    D[SOM catalog]
    A <--> B <--NTLM--> C <--Internet--> D

Installation databaseđź”—

Installed packages are registered in the subdirectory som.d of each product installation directory.

som.feed is a JSON file that contains metadata of the installed packages. In addition, the database directory contains a JSON file for each installed package that lists the installed files and directories.
The Software Manager also stores all the product icons and, on Windows, an uninstaller in this directory.