In article <4B8D34BE.3090108 at mcclatchyinteractive.com>, Tom Georgoulias <tomg at mcclatchyinteractive.com> wrote: > On 03/02/2010 10:04 AM, Tony Mountifield wrote: > > 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. > > You can use cobbler and install clients without DHCP/PXE. When you run > koan, you pass in all of the normal kickstart options you would use to > configure a static network interface (ip, netmask, gateway, dns, > ksdevice, etc.). Koan will download the kickstart config and > initrd/vmlinuz images you need to boot up, plus add all of the grub > entries you need to automatically get into the kickstart after a reboot. > On your next reboot, it will choose that entry in grub, immediately go > into kickstart mode, and follow the config in the ks.cfg file that it > pulled from the cobbler server. Cool, that makes sense - thanks! It hadn't occurred to me that I could add a new kernel and initrd to grub.conf with the required append line, and then just reboot. Obvious when you think about it! Cheers Tony -- Tony Mountifield Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org