On Monday, Jan 3, 2005, at 14:50 US/Central, Philip Rowlands wrote:
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.
Another item to consider is to have either two machines connected via
serial connections or an IP-based KVM. In that way if the install
fails for whatever reason, you can remotely connect to the other box or
the KVM and work on the machine.
For a serial connection, you would use two machines and a null modem
cable. This assumes that each machine has an available serial port.
First, you would connect the null modem cable from the serial port of
one machine to the serial of another. Then you would run minicom on
the second machine to listen for the first machine. Lastly, you would
modify the grub.conf on the first machine to have grub and the kernel
output to a serial console:
http://www.cwelug.org/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?SerialConsole
You then reboot the first machine. Minicom should then show you the
grub console window.
In this way you can access the second machine via ssh and then use
minicom to connect to the first. Once the first machine is upgraded,
you can do the reverse roles to upgrade the second machine (if needed).
The serial connections are more limited but cost less. KVM over IP is
a much cleaner solution, but significantly more expensive.
As always, let us know what you decided and how it went.
Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/downloads
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