[ale] Headless, Consoleless, DVDless, NetInstall? was: Fedora NetInstall via USB Drive

Kenneth Ratliff lists at noctum.net
Fri Apr 17 11:14:09 EDT 2009


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On Apr 17, 2009, at 9:38 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:

> Okay, I'm pretty impressed with the level of expertise I've seen. I
> figure I might as well try this pipe dream out on y'all.
>
> I have a bunch of servers hosted with Peer1 "Managed*" Hosting. They
> do not give console access, so installing my own OS, setting up LVM,
> etc. requires that I pay them to do it for me. Once I have them
> install said OS, I have full control over it, but only via SSH - no
> console. It sounds to me like, as I add servers I ought to be able to
> take their bulky default LAMP stack they give for free. Drop a few
> things in carefully chosen places. Reboot. Ideally, I'd like the
> install process to start sshd very early so that I can handle
> exceptions or install interactively. I [loosely] understand the
> kickstart concept, but since this is a server that I have no physical
> access to, I'd like SSH access early.
>
> Is this doable?
>
> * Managed = They try to reboot my server whenever they don't
> understand what I'm doing (Xen) with it.

If you're looking for a more low-tech solution, you could just  
implement a clone server. Take their default install, then rsync your  
clone's file tree over to the newly installed server with --delete to  
make the file systems exactly the same, then edit the hostname in the  
appropriate config files, make any relevant changes to /etc/fstab (or  
just exclude it on the sync), change the network interfaces setup, and  
then handle your boot loader.

I maintain a clone server that takes daily snapshots. When I need to  
install a new server, I just boot it up on Knoppix, partition, format  
and mount the drives, sync my clones filesystem over to it, run a  
script that updates the hostname and IP, and then manually edit /etc/ 
fstab the way I want it, chroot to what will be the filesystems root  
directory, and run lilo, and reboot. Works fine most of the time.

Alternatively, check with your host and see if they'd be willing to  
install an IP KVM if you provided them with one. We have a few  
customers who have done that, though we don't manage their servers (we  
don't allow root on managed servers anyway)

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