If you have not yet installed IBMs Installation Manager, check out my article on installing Installation Manager.

Installation Manager has certain default preferences. For example, when installing or updating a product, service repositories are searched. You can use the -preferences option to adjust the default behaviour of Installation Manager. In this example, -preferences offering.service.repositories.areUsed=false is used so that service repositories are not searched. You would only want to use this preference when you are installing or updating a product using a local repository. Service repositories are repositories that contain products on www.ibm.com, such as http://www.ibm.com/software/repositorymanager/com.ibm.websphere.BASE.v90.

./imcl install com.ibm.websphere.BASE.v90_9.0.6.20171205_1311
  -repositories /tmp/was
  -installationDirectory /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer
  -acceptLicense
  -prompt
  -preferences offering.service.repositories.areUsed=false

Similarly, if you are installing or updating a product using a response.xml file, you can define preferences in your XML file.

<preference
	name = 'offering.service.repositories.areUsed'
	value = 'false'>
</preference>