Is this possible using Kickstart?

[Eris]

On Friday 29 July 2005 02:21 pm, Rik Herrin wrote:

>   I want to put the Red Hat EL isos on a partition and
> configure grub to automatically start a kickstart
> installation.
...
> The server is on a remote machine which I only have ssh
> access to.

What you need can be done, but it is tricky because everything has to go 
exactly right or else you will be paying your hosting company to restore your 
hard drive.  I've only done this once and I was doing it on my home LAN only 
as practice in case I ever needed to do it for real.  It took me several 
tries to get it right, so if you can practice on a local LAN first where you 
have physical access, that would be good.

WARNING!  If you can get your hosting provider to do this for you, then pay 
them to do it!  It's much easier to install the OS if you have physical 
access.  If they won't do it, try to find someone who has experience doing 
remote installs and pay that person - and make sure they will cover any fees 
to your hosting provider if something goes wrong.

Essentially, all you need to do is add the kickstart file to the installation 
floppy disk image and modify the installation disks startup script to use it.  
Then write that disk image to an empty partition on the existing server.  I 
disabled the existing swap partition and used it.  It doesn't matter that the 
partition is bigger than the floppy image; once the new system is running, 
you can just reinitialize it as a swap partition.

Once the disk image is loaded on the hard drive, add it into the grub 
configuration and set it as the default.

Then reboot.

And hope that you did everything right, because you will not be able to see 
any error messages during the installation.  It either works and the system 
reboots on it's own, or it fails and you have to get the drive restored and 
you start over.

When I did this I was installing RedHat Linux 8, so things may be very 
different now.  I make no guarantee that it is still possible, but I have no 
reason to think it isn't.  

But it really is not easy to do a remote install like this, and the chance of 
messing up the system is quite high, so again, I urge you to try to find 
another way, and if you must resort to this hack then practice it on a spare 
machine at home first until you can get it to work.

Another note: I had to configure the kickstart file so that it would skip X 
configuration, but unless you will need VNC access, you can probably just not 
bother to install X at all.

Eris Caffee