In article <alpine.LRH.2.00.1003021050260.7375 at hogwarts.egr.duke.edu>, Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu> wrote: > On Tue, 2 Mar 2010 at 10:10am, 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. > > This is simple. Grab the vmlinuz and initrd.img files from the pxeboot > directory of the repo you want to install from. Put those in /boot on the > server in question. From there, there are a couple of ways you can go. > The easiest is to actually put the ks.cfg on the server itself. Then you > can add a stanza like the following (you'll need to tailor all the hard > drive references to your own setup, of course) to your grub.conf: > > title reinstall > root (hd0,0) > kernel /boot/vmlinuz ks=hd:sda1:/ks.cfg ksdevice=eth0 > initrd /boot/initrd.img > > Make that entry the default, reboot, and your kickstart will start. > Obviously all of your network info needs to be specified in the ks.cfg > file. > > If you want to grab the ks.cfg from a remote server, that can be done too, > but you'll need to specify the network config options on the "kernel" line > above. I don't have the exact syntax handy, but it's all documented. > Install the "anaconda" package and look in > /usr/share/doc/anaconda-$VERSION/command-line.txt and you can see all the > options you can pass to the install kernel. On CentOS-5 installs I > always use "noipv6", since it seems to make things go much faster. > > For a one-off like this, installing cobbler is a bit (read: a lot) of > overkill. Thanks - much appreciated! Tony -- Tony Mountifield Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org