[CentOS] kexec for CentOS 4?

Tue Mar 2 15:04:06 UTC 2010
Tony Mountifield <tony at softins.clara.co.uk>

In article <4B8D1650.1060001 at mcclatchyinteractive.com>,
Tom Georgoulias <tomg at 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

-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org