remote installs?

Dan Stromberg strombrg at dcs.nac.uci.edu
Wed Mar 2 21:36:37 UTC 2005


On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 19:33:21 +0000, Stuart Sears wrote:

> On Wednesday 02 March 2005 00:23, Dan Stromberg wrote:
>> I have a Redhat Enterprise 3 AS install to do tonight.  The machine isn't
>> located in one of the buildings where I have an office, so sitting there
>> waiting for it to finish installing would be a pain.  I'd prefer it if I
>> could walk over, start up the install, and walk back to my relatively cozy
>> office.  :)
>>
>> I've been experimenting with VNC as a way of doing installs.  It seems to
>> work great, but I've been doing it by popping in the first cdrom,
>> launching a VNC install, and then doing things remotely.  The problem is,
>> that after the install is done, that cdrom is still in the cd drive, so
>> the reboot after the install comes back up off of the install cdrom.
>>
>> Is there some way of ejecting the cdrom in such a way that it won't be
>> reloaded, via VNC, or something like that?
> Are you installing from a network resource like NFS, ftp, http, or even a  
> local Hard Disk? (I would assume so, as you won't be there to swap CDs).
> Is that's the case, once the install has begun (ie, you are past the "running 
> anaconda..." message, you should be able to physically eject the CD at that 
> point as it is no longer playing an active part in the process...

Yes, this worked well for me last night - except that upon first reboot,
the machine came up with a firewall that was blocking everything,
including ssh.  But other than that, this is a great way to do it.

And yes, you assumed correctly: we usually do our installs over NFS.





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