On Friday 29 July 2005 02:21 pm, Rik Herrin wrote: > I want to put the Red Hat EL isos on a partition and > configure grub to automatically start a kickstart > installation. ... > The server is on a remote machine which I only have ssh > access to. What you need can be done, but it is tricky because everything has to go exactly right or else you will be paying your hosting company to restore your hard drive. I've only done this once and I was doing it on my home LAN only as practice in case I ever needed to do it for real. It took me several tries to get it right, so if you can practice on a local LAN first where you have physical access, that would be good. WARNING! If you can get your hosting provider to do this for you, then pay them to do it! It's much easier to install the OS if you have physical access. If they won't do it, try to find someone who has experience doing remote installs and pay that person - and make sure they will cover any fees to your hosting provider if something goes wrong. Essentially, all you need to do is add the kickstart file to the installation floppy disk image and modify the installation disks startup script to use it. Then write that disk image to an empty partition on the existing server. I disabled the existing swap partition and used it. It doesn't matter that the partition is bigger than the floppy image; once the new system is running, you can just reinitialize it as a swap partition. Once the disk image is loaded on the hard drive, add it into the grub configuration and set it as the default. Then reboot. And hope that you did everything right, because you will not be able to see any error messages during the installation. It either works and the system reboots on it's own, or it fails and you have to get the drive restored and you start over. When I did this I was installing RedHat Linux 8, so things may be very different now. I make no guarantee that it is still possible, but I have no reason to think it isn't. But it really is not easy to do a remote install like this, and the chance of messing up the system is quite high, so again, I urge you to try to find another way, and if you must resort to this hack then practice it on a spare machine at home first until you can get it to work. Another note: I had to configure the kickstart file so that it would skip X configuration, but unless you will need VNC access, you can probably just not bother to install X at all. Eris Caffee -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
