On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Brent Harding wrote: > How do you set servers up then? I was thinking real simple, You hit the nail on the head here. One of the primary uses of Kickstart is to remotely install linux on servers, and many of them are sure to be headless (no monitor, and maybe no video card, and without those, a mouse would also be useless, of course). > serial cable, run minicom on my client system, should work fine, Like a remote serial terminal, you mean, no doubt. Just the kind of thing Kickstart was designed for. > but are most preconfigured to accept serial out of the box? If the system has no video card, the Linux kernel will default the console to the first available serial port, and some BIOS will also act similarly, I believe. You can force serial mode: the current RH 7.2 installation manual says: Note that the command to start a serial installation has changed. If you must perform the installation in serial mode, use the following command: boot: linux text console=<device> In this command, <device> should be the device you are using (such as ttyS0 or ttyS1) Presumably, the serial device would be a braille terminal, or synth, or the equivalent, in this case, as you indicated. You would also need to include the appropriate kickstart directives to the boot prompt command line above, of course, unless you have edited the bootloader config file on the boot floppy with the same info (such as: ks=floppy). As for the apparent failure with no monitor or mouse, indicated in the previous post (below), the install probably just stopped and waited for interactive input, because of _required_ kickstart directives that were missing, as follows: # Manual says mouse spec is REQUIRED: mouse none # Optional (but you probably want these): # Skip configuring X (GUI) -- can do later, or not at all: skipx # Prevent installing in GUI mode (do it in text mode): text # End of additional config lines (snip here). I suppose that last directive is probably redundant if you start the install in text mode, but it can't hurt. Again, if you leave any required directive out, the install will ask (and wait) for interactive input, according to the manual. Someone should suggest to RedHat that they should make this sort of thing optionally timeout, while taking a no configure default (after a configured timeout = ???). Better yet, include a "blind" option that sets the defaults to all of the above options -- this would be useful to sighted users, too. Note that if you leave out "skipx", and fail to pre-program the X (GUI) values needed, you are going to be interactively prompted for them. LCR > >On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Tommy Moore wrote: > > > >> One thing I've noticed with RH 7.2 though is if you don't > >> have a monitor and mouse connected when you run the kick > >> start file it bombs out and doesn't install the system. -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html