trying to setup for a remote installation

[Philip Rowlands]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, bruce wrote:

>in order to do a remote FC3 installation, using vnc, it appears that i need
>to create a floppy bootdisk, copy a kickstart file to it, place the FC3 ISOs
>on a HTTP server, and add the required VNC commands to the bootloader of the
>kickstart file.

Hi Bruce,

I think I may have clouded rather than clarified the kickstart process:

- Do you want to automate the installation (i.e. launch it and
walk away), or go through the prompts (disk layout, package
selection) manually?

Kickstart files are necessary only in the first case; kickstart is not
needed simply to perform a remote install.

- How will the machine be booted up?

Floppy images are severely lacking when it comes to network
installation; you'd have to mess around with driver disks, which isn't
much fun. CD would be simplest; PXE (i.e. boot entirely from the
network) is another option, but requires DHCP, TFTP, HTTP/NFS servers.

- What's the purpose of the VNC invocation?

Is the machine in an inaccessible rack/office somewhere? Does the bootup
to install have to work entirely "hands-off", or is there someone to
insert a floppy/CD?

To put a kickstart file on the harddisk, this is the syntax (from
kickstart-docs.txt):
       ks=hd:<device>:/<file>
  e.g. ks=hd:sda3:/mydir/ks.cfg


Cheers,
Phil