server migration with gPXE

[Curtis Kore]

Hi,

I have been tasked with migrating a number of fedora 6 servers to centos
5.5. The problem is I don't have any console access, usb key, cdrom or
floppy. So my question is, can still remotely install centos 5.5 on these
servers using gPXE without any of these options available?

Thanks in advance,

Curtis

[Joseph L. Casale]

I have been tasked with migrating a number of fedora 6 servers to centos 5.5.
The problem is I don't have any console access, usb key, cdrom or floppy.
So my question is, can still remotely install centos 5.5 on these servers using
gPXE without any of these options available?
Thanks in advance,

You don't need gPXE, you can add a grub entry that points to the kernel and
initial ramdisk from the iso that you copy into /boot.

Finally, add a ` ks=http://...` and possibly a `vnc vncpassword=...` to the
kernel line in the grub stanza, set it to default, then reboot.

Make sure you get it right:) I do this all the time in this scenario, it works fine.

jlc

[Joseph L. Casale]

Thanks for the quick response, but i am still not clear on how I am getting
an ip address on the server after reboot, you mean the ks=http://x.x.x.x line
is going to be applied to my server? or do I need to have a kickstart server on
my network and that line points to it?

A "kickstart server " is really glorified speak, a host with an http server would
suffice. Have a read on the rhel docs about ks installations:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Installation_Guide/ch-kickstart2.html

A working example I last used was:

title CentOS Anaconda Install
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0 ks=http://host.domain.com/foo.cfg vnc vncpassword=SuperSecret
initrd /initrd.img

By now you should have the hang of it, you specify the ip and many other params
for that matter on the kernel line...

Once the kernel and initrd are loaded into memory, you can actually wipe
and reconfigure the block devices so there really is no limitation to what
can be in the ks file.

Good luck,
jlc

Ps. http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/mailinglists