How to do a remote install when working from home.

One of the greatest challenges is working on remote lab systems when your a Home Based employee. Such is the situation I found myself in, how to upgrade a SunFire V40z from CentOS 4.6 to the latest CentOS 5.3 .

Fortunately for me, this problem was solved with Anaconda, unfortunately for me the version shipped with CentOS 4.6 didn't hand a sufficient buffer for all the arguments I wanted to pass - you can see where this is headed. So, it was with great expectations that I ftp'ed a PXE Boot version of vmlinuz and initrd.img to the /boot directory, updated the Grub menu.lst file with my configuration updates and rebooted...

Poof! Nothing...

Lucky for me there was a way ... the SunFireV40z Service Processor could allow me access to the Boot Console and the serial port had been wired to a KVM. This allowed me to remove all the excess white space, and unused arguments to end up with the secret sauce:

title CentOS PXE Boot (VncConnect)
     root (hd0,0)
     kernel /vmlinuz.pxe console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0 \
vnc vncpassword=myVNCpassword \
headless \
ip=10.0.0.100 netmask=255.255.255.0 \
gateway=10.0.0.1 dns=10.0.0.1 \
ksdevice=eth0 \
method=http://repository.centos.mirror/centos/5.3/os/i386/ \
lang=en_US keymap=us \
root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 \
ro
     initrd /initrd.img.pxe

This allowed the system to return to it's place on the network and begin it's new life as an IPv6 test bed. Anaconda is a very powerful utility once you learn to leverage it's features.

- Rich.