In article 4B8D1650.1060001@mcclatchyinteractive.com, Tom Georgoulias tomg@mcclatchyinteractive.com wrote:
On 03/02/2010 05:10 AM, Tony Mountifield wrote:
I have a remote CentOS 4 machine on a network where I can't put a DHCP or PXE server, and I want to do a complete reinstall. So what I want to do is, from the currently-running system, to invoke an installation kernel and initrd in just the same way that GRUB would, giving it a boot command line that specifies a remote kickstart file, installation tree, and other required info.
If not, are there any other ways to achieve what I've described?
I would use cobbler and koan for this. Once you have a cobbler server setup for the kickstart (which is super easy to do), you can use koan with the --replace-self and -k options and do exactly what you want.
Can this be done even if I can't put the cobbler server on the same network as the box I want to re-install? The information I found on cobbler suggested to me that it was a tying together of DHCP, PXE, kickstart and install tree. As I understand it, the DHCP and PXE/TFTP servers have to be local, and also I have to have the box able to perform a PXE boot. So if the box in question is remote and on a network that I don't control or have any other boxes on, I suspect cobbler and koan wouldn't work.
I could well have misunderstood - I found very little detail about koan apart from the command line options.
Cheers Tony