Unattended Install (Upgrade)

[Bret Hughes]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 09:48, David C. Hart wrote:
> I have never been terribly adept with kicker - nor am I sure that's what
> I need anyway.
> 
> I'd like to upgrade a few machines (RH9 -> Fedora). Is it possible to
> configure something so that a reboot with a Fedora CD1 will
> automatically run the upgrade without intervention?
> 
> Thanks.

Yep.

I have not done it with fedora yet but the pieces are there since I did
boot from the boot.iso image to do my install.

We did about 30 upgrades in one night on machines that physical access
was very difficult ( mounted under elevators)  Acutally we did
reinstalls but upgrades should work too.


Basic steps we did was:
setup an nfs export that could be accessed by the machines that
contained the isos (actually this was using a single installation tree
with all the dirs, but on my Fedora install two days ago I was able to
simply point the install to the parent of the isos that was created
during a bittorrent dl.)

build a ks.cfg (kickstart) file that uses the nfs share as the location
to install from

copy the installation vmlinuz and initrd.img to /boot
set up lilo or whatever bootloader to boot to the install image passing
the kickstart file location via append statement.

run lilo -R install to tell it to boot once into the install image.

shutdown -r now 

I have a script that sets up the machine for the kickstart by dling some
files from an internal ftp server as well as a lilo.conf stanza that
worked for us if you want me to send it off line to get you started.

I am sure that the same thing can be accomplished with grub too.  It is
pretty off topic I suppose to be posted to the entire list.

Here is also a kickstart-list at redhat.com where the real gurus hang
out.

Bret