[ale] Headless, Consoleless, DVDless, NetInstall? was: Fedora NetInstall via USB Drive

[scott mcbrien]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com>wrote:

> Okay, I'm pretty impressed with the level of expertise I've seen. I
> figure I might as well try this pipe dream out on y'all.
>
> I have a bunch of servers hosted with Peer1 "Managed*" Hosting. They
> do not give console access, so installing my own OS, setting up LVM,
> etc. requires that I pay them to do it for me. Once I have them
> install said OS, I have full control over it, but only via SSH - no
> console. It sounds to me like, as I add servers I ought to be able to
> take their bulky default LAMP stack they give for free. Drop a few
> things in carefully chosen places. Reboot. Ideally, I'd like the
> install process to start sshd very early so that I can handle
> exceptions or install interactively. I [loosely] understand the
> kickstart concept, but since this is a server that I have no physical
> access to, I'd like SSH access early.
>
> Is this doable?
>
> * Managed = They try to reboot my server whenever they don't
> understand what I'm doing (Xen) with it.
>
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.


Not using the RH, CentOS, or Fedora installers unless you decide to rewrite
them.  What you could do is kick off the installer with the VNC server
option.  If there is another machine that can contact your target, you could
vncviewer -via user at othermachine installingmachine:1; that would tunnel you
to the already installed machine, then use it to make a vnc connection to
the machine you want to install.  You'd still have to have a way of getting
the installer going, since the vnc server isn't started until stage2 of the
install, but you could do that by passing additional arguments on the
installer kernel commandline.

Getting a better handle on kickstart is probably your fastest/best route,
interactive installs are overrated.

-Scott
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