i will soon be getting control of a freinds dedicated server, it came with redhat 9 installed, which i then remotely upgraded to fedora core 3, but since im not a big redhat fan, and all my home boxes run slack i want to install slackware on this server. main problem of course is that i dont have physical access to the machine so i would have to find a way to do the install remotely. i know its possible, just not sure where to even start. any help or maybe a tutorial some kind slacker can point me too? also im pretty new in the server game so what config files should i be sure to save, like resolve.conf and what not?

One of the simplest ways to install/upgrade in LAN I find satisfactory is to mount NFS partition with packages repository, run installpkg/upgradepkg and finaly unmount NFS partiton. On remote box should run ssh-server and this procedure can be handled with ssh client or even without it only through cron job if enough brave

the server isnt in my lan though, so i cant mount it in that way as far as i know. the server itself is most lilkely half way accross the country

No, that isn't possible. At least, not all in one shot.

You could install Slackware on another partition on the drive, then setup LILO to boot it and pray to God that everything went well and it starts up.

But even then you won't be able to completely replace Fedora with Slackware in one move. If you managed to get Slackware installed, and actually got it booted remotely and remembered to do everything that would be needed for it to setup a SSH connection that you could connect to, you could then wipe Fedora off of the other partitions.

Not only would this be pretty damn difficult to pull of perfectly (and it needs to be perfect for it to work) but this seems like the sort of thing that would piss off the owner of the server, no?

So the bottom line is that you could hack around with it and get some sort of a Slackware system setup, but the risk of totally screwing up the server would be (to me anyway) way to high.

im going to be the owner of the server so i dont think id piss myself off too much, and if it does get screwed up its not a big deal, my friend is just handing over control of it and i pick of the monthly bill. since he already had paid the set up fee he didnt want to see it go to waste, so if the whole things dies a fiery death, i just cancel the server and i lose nothing.
i knew it couldnt be done in one shot already, i had figured i'd need to go about it the way MS3FGX said. my plan is to install the server exactly how i want onto a virtual machine through vmware, tar the whole damn thing up, extract to a separate partition, copy over the needed conf files, set up lilo and reboot. then if all goes well erase the fedora partition and move over the new slack install then have a clean slack system. i wonder though if there would be problems with some of the hardware detection since it would be pre configured to the specs of the virtual machine.
another idea i had, although not sure how realistic, would be to hack up the slackware disk 1 iso image to support ssh, put that on the separate partition and have lilo boot to that, running the actual installer, which would give me a damn near perfect install.
i will defiantly need to test these methods throughly in vmware before going ahead, but like i said, until i get the first bill the server is more or less free so i dont have much to lose.
if there may be an easier way though i'd love to hear it, or even if anyone can offer some help on the actual details of the method mentioned above that would be pretty nifty too

You don't own the server, you are just paying for the right to use it.

Whoever you are paying the bills to owns the server and set the machine up, and they aren't going to be happy if you trash the system and then just cancel your contract because you can't fix it.

The tar idea could work, tar has the ability to preserve file permissions and symlinks.

But it is complicated by the fact that you will need to have multiple archives, since you should never have a server with everything on only a single partition.

Installing it in VMWare might also be a problem. But the install would probably still boot on a different machine, though not necessarily happily.

The other idea with hacking the ISO to start the SSH daemon and allow you to do a remote install is dubious at best. I don't know if LILO will even boot an ISO stored on the HDD.

The easiest and most logical way would be to just mount the Slackware ISO as a loopback device, and run the setup program on it. Point it to the partitions you want it to install, and let it run.

You may run into problems when it asks for the source of the packages, you would have to play around with that, but I imagine you could point it back at the partition it is running from and get it to pick them up from the ISO (though you may have to just extract the whole ISO to the filesystem).

But first of all, do you even have enough free space and/or open partitions to attempt this? Resizing partitions non-destructively is not an easy task, and you may find you can't even get past that part of this whole epic.

In fact, if your current setup is all installed into a single partition, and worse, takes up the entire drive, that is probably enough to stop you in your tracks right there, since you can't resize a mounted partition, and you would need to have physical access to the machine to boot it with a boot disk that is capable of resizing partitions.

Come to think of it, are you sure you are even allowed to be doing this?

You need to check the TOS of your server provider or talk to a rep, to find out if you can make a massive change like this.

It's not like they just give you the root password to a server in their network and say "Have fun". There are rules that must be followed, and the usage of your server can be monitored and they can shut you down at any time if they feel you are doing something that could be a problem for them.

To that end, they want to keep the systems as uniform as possible. If they only offer Red Hat/Fedora, it is likely that is the only distro they know how to support, so it is quite possible they will not allow another distro on their hardware.

Not that they check every machine every day to see what it is doing, but from time to time, most providers reserve the right to ask you for technical information on your server, such as what software it is running, and what it is actually doing. If you fail to provide this information, they can terminate your contract.

true the server company is technically the owner, but this actually is one of the rare cases where they do inf act give you a server with root access and more or less say "have fun". as long as you dont use the service to perform any illegal activities they pretty much dont care what you do with the box.even if the install got totally hosed, i wont be touching the partition table so they can still do a fresh install as normal for the next customer to get the server.
as far as space there is plenty, and plenty of partitions. even if it didnt have enough partitions i could always temporarily turn the swap partition into and normal linux partition, mke2fs it and use that as the mount point for the second OS, then set it all back up right after the switch is complete.
the plan of trying to boot it from the install cd wasnt exactly to try and get lilo to boot the iso, but to gunzip and mount the initrd.img, play with it to get ssh support, copy the files over to an empty partition on the server and boot into that.
the idea of mounting the slack iso as a loopback and running the actual setup scripts that way does seem like the easiest way, surprised i didnt think of that. and since the installer will allow you to specify a directory containing all the packages instead of using the cd it should work well. so i could remove the /home directory which is on a separate partition, stick it on the / partition and install slack to that.
its also true that the server company will not be able to offer tech support for a slackware system, but with what they charge for support i wouldnt ask for it even if it still had the original redhat 9 install. they do support more then just redhat/fedora. the distros they offer though are only the ones which control panel apps like plesk and cpanel can run on out of the box and unfortunately slackware is not a distro that the creators of these software packages feel they need to support.