>>>>> "DM" == Dave Mangot <Dave.Mangot@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: DM> Has anyone on the list ever kickstarted over a WAN? I've kickstarted at home over my cable modem off of my server at work. It worked fine; I only get about 2.5Mbps downstream so it took a little while but it was still more convenient than burning CDs. DM> When the developers are done trashing a RH 7.3 machine, I want to DM> be able to "reimage" the remote machine so that it has a fresh DM> kickstart install. Back when I still used lilo I had a "reinstall" target that, when booted into, would reinstall a machine. It worked pretty well, but my setup has changed so much that I'd have to start from scratch. DM> 1. How do I kick off the anaconda installer on a running machine? All you have to do is load the vmlinuz and initrd.img from the bootnet floppy and pass the proper parameters. These can be on the hard disk if you like. DM> 3. How would I set the default gateway so that the kickstarting DM> machine could actually talk to the kickstart server? I use DHCP; the machine will set the proper IP address once it gets the kickstart file from the http server. DM> I know with Solaris I would just dump a WebStart image on the 2nd DM> internal disk in the box and then boot off of that. I don't think DM> I can do that with kickstart. Why not? It doesn't care where the image comes from; the initrd is self contained. You could even build a custom initrd file with the appropriate kickstart file already in it; if you do this dynamically, all you should have to do is build a proper initrd and put it and the proper vmlinuz in /boot, kick grub so that it will reboot into the proper image once, and reboot. If all goes well, the machine should come back up into the newly installed OS. The major assumption is that you can get Grub to _not_ reboot into the "reinstall" target; otherwise the machine will just reinstall itself endlessly. - J<
