On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 00:19, Ben Brown wrote: > Recently, I had the task of upgrading 7 servers from Red Hat 7.3 to FC1. > These machines had been crammed in a closet, without a KVM, in such a > way that connecting a keyboard & monitor was near impossible. So, I used > kickstart and made a CD to automate the process. > > This worked great, but it meant walking downstairs, popping in the CD, > walking back to my desk, rebooting, walking back downstairs, removing > the CD, placing it in machine number two, and starting all over again. > > I am always looking for ways to avoid getting out of my chair (read: > lazy), so I wondered if there was an better way. I found a couple of > sites online that talked about using kickstart straight out of a lilo or > grub stanza. I attempted this method on a test machine (with a > monitor!), and found that in upgrade mode, the grub stanza to start the > upgrade was still the default after the upgrade completed. Meaning I was > stuck in a loop. > > So, the question: Is there a better way? This would be very useful, as I > have several clients with servers running RH73/9 that I could upgrade > remotely. Three suggestions: Make a boot.iso CD with your kickstart on it. Install via the network. Boot via the CD, wait 2 minutes to ensure that they are started, and remove the CD. The install should continue via the network without the need for the CD. Don't make the grub install the default. Choose it manually (if you can) and install via the network. It shouldn't default to the grub installer. Rebuild the kernel and/or anaconda so that it will default to the new kernel, not the grub install. Forrest
