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

[Brian MacLeod]

Hmm...okay, so let's start at the beginning:

*** Richard Said:
>> They do not give console access

The price you pay for managed servers.  This imposes a lot of limits,
but it CAN be done.  SSH, however, is not going to be an option here,
unless someone's got some really cool stuff they are working with.


*** Scott said:
> 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 could do it this way, particularly if you have another server with
them, you SSH into that box with X forwarding, and then invoke the
vncclient back to the server you are reinstalling.  But, there is a
slightly easier option.  However, all options I can quickly come up
with bear some security risks.  In this case of this, there is
exposure of what you are doing to the network at the center, including
any passwords transmitted between machines. That's if you have another
server.

The other option you could use, and I will caution on the security of
this, but you could tell the installation (assuming RH/Centos/Fedora
type) to create a server session with an IP address of a listening
vncclient (man pages help on how you start this on your system, note
that this may require holes in firewalls at your controlled client
point).

The following article is quite relevant:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/024oct06/features/kickstart/

In particular, you would want to issue a boot line that invokes the
kernel with the options:
vnc vncconnect=<IPADDRESSOFCLIENT>:<PORTOPENEDINFIREWALL>

As you research kickstart, you may also wish to create a kickstart
file and use it.  You may also have to specify your network parameters
(see ifconfig, resolv.conf, and such) to the installer.

This gets us to the nuts and bolts.  The machine likely boots with
grub, and as such, the big thing for you to do would be to add a few
lines to grub to reference your kernel and initrd (as well as your
options for vnc/kickstart) and make that the default.  Depending
heavily on the partition scheme, you may be able to source your
distribution from there, but I would tend to look at treating this as
a network install, thus, have it pull the installation from mirror
sites on the internet -- use the PXEBOOT vmlinuz and initrd.img.

After all that, consider this: if something goes wrong, you'll have to
pay them to fix it in all likelihood.  In addition, sometimes these
managed servers are in fact VMs, so, it is possible some of this may
break/what you intend to do with Xen may not work.  And of course, I
have to mention that some drivers for hardware (hard drives/scsi
controllers, network controllers) may not be in these images, or may
require that you specify that they load (auto-detection fails).  This
would of course keep you from being able to do much for an install.
The potential trouble of getting this borked with the effort to get it
right might be worth the money paid to them to have them do it for
you.

bnm



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