Install F10 on a machine that has no CD/DVD drive, i.e. VPS

[Sharpe, Sam J]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 13:29 +0100, Gabriel - IP Guys wrote:
> > I'm sorry for the title. It is a challenge that I have at the moment.
> > We
> > have some VPS(s) 6 in total, and I wish to upgrade the distro that
> > comes
> > with them. They are currently running FC3 - which is umm... a little
> > older than I'm comfortable with. I do recall a few years back that I
> > managed to do something similar with debian, where I was able to
> > upgrade
> > the distro running, to run  a debian distro of my choice following a
> > guide online, and I recall I had to turn off swap, and use chroot in
> > the
> > swap partition, something like that.
>
> I've no idea what a VPS is,
Virtual Private Server:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server
> but if it can boot from a USB pendrive
> (thumbdrive, memory stick, whatever) then the procedure is fairly
> simple.
It really depends what kind of VPS it is... I think we'd have to know 
more details. Sometimes these VPS(s) are software partitions on the same 
machine that share the same operating system and I'm not sure it's 
possible to completely upgrade the OS.

In general, you can either connect a DVD and run RPM with the Freshen 
argument (rpm -F) against the RPMs on the DVD, or fiddle with the Yum 
repository definitions to point to a new updated repo and run yum upgrade.

But really - an FC3 to F10 upgrade via that method is going to be your 
own personal hell. So much has changed and this install method is 
completely unsupported and untested that it's likely that you will break 
lots of things.

What kind of interface do you get to these VPS's? Can you see the grub 
menu when they boot? If so, what about copying the kernel and initrd 
from an F10 DVD, adding the appropriate entry into /etc/grub.conf and 
then booting to the installer?

Something like:

title F10upgrade
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-f10 text askmethod
    initrd /initrd-f10

And then if it boots (I suggest trying this on a local system first 
because I'm inventing this as I go along) you can do an anaconda upgrade 
in text mode.

--
Sam