On Sun, 2005-09-18 at 13:13 -0700, Dave Laird wrote:
Good afternoon, Netizens...
I have a number of 3.3 CentOS boxes that are quite a substantial distance from my home office. Short of physically going to those sites with a fresh set of CD's in hand, is there a method of remotely (via secure SSH) updating not only the files but the distribution as well, say to 4.1? Can you do a distribution update without using CD's?
After a few weeks of experimenting with CentOS 4.1 I am really motivated to upgrade, if for no other reason than the fresh kernel and x.org, to name just a few.
If you are willing to do kickstarts, then, yes. you can do this. Add a reinstall entry to your /etc/grub.conf using vnc (you connect to myserver:1)
title Reinstall System kernel /vmlinuz-reinstall ks=<URL>/server-reinstall.cfg vnc initrd /initrd-reinstall.img
where vmlinuz-reinstall and intrd-reinstall.img are the vmlinuz and initrd.img from the pxe subdirectory of os/<arch>/images/pxeboot that you need to download and drop in /boot (the above assumes /boot is its own partition otherwise you'll need /boot/vm..). There are a bunch of issues with doing this:
1) are you comfortable with kickstart? 2) are the machines using static addressing or dhcp? if static, then you'll have to add a few command line parameters:
ip=w.x.y.z netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=w.x.y.1 dns=w.x.y.2
3) you'll probably want to add a vncpassword=xxxxx flag as well
You'll probably want to play with a local machine first (and make sure someone is there to push a power button :).
Hope that helps, Sean