On Sun, 2 Jan 2005, S. W. Davison wrote:
>We would like to upgrade all the machines to RHEL 3, but we
>would like to make the upgrades entirely remotely controlled
>and entirely automated.
>Reading the kickstart documentation, it looks as if one way
>to accomplish a kickstart install is to put a kickstart file
>(ks.cfg) on an ext2 partition of the machine to be upgraded.
Possible, although unnecessary. The kickstart file can live out on the
network (HTTP, FTP, or NFS).
>If I can do that, it seems to me that it ought to be possible to build
>the necessary vmlinuz, intitrd, and whatever else I needed (the stuff
>that would ordinarily be on the boot/install floppy), put them into
>/boot on the machine to be upgraded, and then change lilo's default
>boot command to: "linux ks=hd:sda3:/mydir/ks.cfg"
Yes, and if your requirements aren't too strange the
images/pxeboot/{vmlinuz,initrd.img} will handle all supported drivers
and install methods.
>Then, if I do a "shutdown -r" over a network connection, the target
>system should reboot and go straight into the kickstart installation,
>just as if it had booted from the floppy disk.
Nearly; the bootloader will have to be directed to load the files
mentioned above.
With remote machines, I'd be sure to test, test, test locally before
reinstalling for real; the part to pay the most attention to would be
the network setup.
Cheers,
Phil
