On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Jim Wildman wrote: > There are at least 3 ways to do this. > 1) Use something like Yum (http://dulug.duke.edu/yum) which will allow > you to do 'yum upgrade' I've looked at the website, and it looks nice. but it's not at all obvious to me it would upgrade from one release of RHL to another. > > 2) Buy licenses and use RedHat Network which will allow you to schedule > upgrades from a web interface. I don't think that upgrades from one release to the next either. > > 3) Configure PXE boot so if the box is rebooted and a particular link is > in place it reinstalls, else boot from the local drive. This has possibilities, but needs some care and attention to work. AFAIK it only works if your NIC actually supports PXE. It may also be possible to configure LILO or GRUB to have a boot option that runs your updater. You would install the upgrade package (possibly pretty much what's on the standard RHL CD, possibly in its own partition) You would configure the bootloader to boot your installer, reboot and off it goes. In the %post section of your ks file, it reconfigurs the bootloader to return to your regular program when it reboots. I think when it works it would work wonderfully, but when it fails (and there's always the possibility of something going awry, just ask NASA), you will need the Big Shovel. Something you should consider carfully is the need to upgrade the software so often. The single greatest cause of failures here is misbegotten software upgrades. If the system is working well, but you need that gee-which new package in The Latest RHL, consider building the src.rpm. Often that's quite painless, and a low-risk path to follow. I don't imagine you'd often need to upgrade for new hardware support - after all, the system's already working, isn't it? Sometimes a kernel from a later release can be a good thing - I was running Rawhide .17 kernels because I discovered a 30% improvement in disk performance over the early RHL 7.x kernels. If you find you only need to upgrade to new releases once every two years instead of every six months, you immediately reduce your workload and the risk of doing something bad. That has to be good for reliability. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://www.rossberry.com > > On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Cheryl L. Southard wrote: > > > Hi All, > > > > Currently, when I upgrade a RedHat Linux computer, I have to first fiddle with > > the EEPROM settings to boot off CD. Then I have to boot off the RHL 8.0 > > CDROM, then I type > > boot> linux ks=nfs:server:/path/to/ks/config/file/ks.cfg > > After I am finished, I go back into the EEPROM and turn off booting off > > the CD. All this is done with me sitting at the console. > > > > Is there any way to do a completely hands-off installation? I would like > > to be able to use kickstart to upgrade a computer remotely. With new > > versions of RedHat Linux coming out every 6-8 months, and the growing > > number of computers I manage, it would be nice if I didn't have to physically > > visit each computer. > > > > My dream would be to upgrade all 40 computers one evening sitting at my > > home in my PJ's, working via my cable-modem. I have already figured out > > how to do this for my Solaris jumpstart upgrades and it really has sped > > things up. > > > > Thanks, > > > > Cheryl > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Kickstart-list mailing list > Kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list > -- Please, reply only to the list.
