Hey Everyone,

I have an offsite server in an out-of-state rack.
It's currently running Ubunto 10.10, but I have to change it to CentOS 5.6.

I only have SSH access to the server, and no one on site.
I was thinking about creating a partition with the install and an answer file for the install and praying that when I reboot it it will work.

Do you think this is possible to do?
I would love to hear any other bright ideas

Thanks,
Alon.

Any chance the server is equipped with IPMI?

No such luck...

Without IPMI or another similar way to access the console directly (some KVM switches can be SSH'ed into, and consoles brought up that way), you won't be able to do the install.

You could *TRY* to get an identical server at your local location, perform the install, and use systemimager or mondoarchive to 'clone' the system, ship out the DVD's, and hope for the best. But getting in the car/on a plane may be the safest way, since you may wind up with a dead server and no way to recover it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks!

That's what I thought, but I was just wondering if I missed something....

I agree, without IPMI, the amount of time required to "bulletproof" this remote installation and then troubleshoot any problems will probably cost more in labor than a plane ticket out there to do the install in person.

If there is an OS on it you can usually change it on the fly. Knoppix had some web help on how to install a live system. That involved a number of steps that basically ended up chroot. Might look at that on a virtual machine as a test to see if it can be done over network.

Otherwise, you might be able to install a mini install at the beginning of the server boot disk to then reboot into it. Then the mini os would be used to install the regular OS. I would not attempt to install over the current data but I think it can be done. Just not sure of what would happen on chroot and chmods when you need it.

A mini os to ram disk might even work.