On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote: > My friend uses a typical dual-boot setup (Windows XP and Centos 5.3). > The machine is online 24/7 and he often uses it from a remote location > (Linux via ssh -X, Windows via rdesktop). > > The problem is that he wants to be able to remotely configure which of > these two OSes is to be the default on next reboot, so he can switch > from one OS to the other and back remotely. If Linux is up, he just > needs to reconfigure grub.conf, but if Windows is up (and default) he > has no way of accessing grub.conf. > > Now, he has several partitions on the drive, some ntfs, some vfat and > some ext3. Is there a clean way of putting grub.conf on a vfat > partition? Is there a way for Windows to have rw access to ext3 > filesystem (namely, /)? Is there some other way of handling this > without physical access to the machine while it boots? > > I have suggested virtualization of Windows, so he could run them both > concurrently without pain, but for certain (computational performance) > reasons that is not a good option for him --- he wants hard reboots > between OSes. > > Any suggestions? > > Thanks! :-) > Marko > I have not done this, but maybe a small vfat partition with syslinux instead of grub as the boot loader. Then you could edit the configuration from both Windows and Linux. It might also be a good idea for him to look into one of these single-port IP/KVMs in case he needs to get to the console: http://www.lantronix.com/it-management/kvm-over-ip/securelinx-spider.html