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