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

[Gabriel - IP Guys]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-
> bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Seann Clark
> Sent: 15 April 2009 14:42
> To: Community assistance, encouragement,and advice for using Fedora.
> Subject: Re: Install F10 on a machine that has no CD/DVD drive, i.e.
> VPS
> 
> 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, but if it can boot from a USB pendrive
> > (thumbdrive, memory stick, whatever) then the procedure is fairly
> > simple. Basically you install a copy of the Fedora Live CD on your
> > pendrive, boot from it, check that your hardware works and when
> > satisfied click the icon that says "Install".
> >
> > See
> > http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-making-
> media.
> > html#id3163538
> >
> > poc
> >
> >
> If you can't get it to boot VIA USB, two ways that I can think of that
> I have done before that could work, create an NFS mount, or drop it
> into an http server directory, and PXE boot, or use a floppy disk to
> generically boot it (I haven't done the floppy way in years, as I have
> a PXE server).
> 
> If you are doing a lot of them you could look into Cobbler, with is a
> distro system (yum repo has it) and allows you to do the same thing
and
> is easier across a number of systems as you can do a mass build
without
> much admin overhead after the server is running initially.
> 
> 
> ~Seann

Seann - Thank you for your comments - I'll look into Cobbler - but for
internal use. I am forever rebuilding servers in house and that would be
a great solution. But as for a colo - these machines have public IPs, as
in they are connected straight to the internet.