Jason L Tibbitts III wrote: >>>>>> "DM" == Dave Mangot <Dave.Mangot@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> 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. > >> When the developers are done trashing a RH 7.3 machine, I want to >> be able to "reimage" the remote machine so that it has a fresh >> 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. > >> 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. > >> 3. How would I set the default gateway so that the kickstarting >> 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. > >> I know with Solaris I would just dump a WebStart image on the 2nd >> internal disk in the box and then boot off of that. I don't think >> 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. Yes you can. As part of my kickstarts of 7.3 I install the 2.4.18-10 kernel upgrade as I don't like the stock kernel thrashing our Solaris NFS servers ;-) What I do in the %post section is: rpm -ivh ftp://mirror.cam.pace.co.uk/pub/redhat/linux/updates/7.3/en/os/i386/kernel-2 .4.18-10.i386.rpm /sbin/grubby --set-default=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-10 I'm sure that Grub, like LILO, has a 'reboot into this image on next reboot only' option too. Cheers, Neil. -- Neil Bingham, Software Team Leader, Engineering Tools Group. Pace Micro Technology plc Tel: +44 (0) 1223 518574 645 Newmarket Road, Fax: +44 (0) 1223 518526 Cambridge, United Kingdom, CB5 8PB WWW: http://www.pace.co.uk/
