On Thursday 23 September 2004 21:13, Colin Murphy wrote:

This is purely from the point of view of wanting to 'play' with some of the machines I get given. All the machines will be different, different hardware, different resources, different needs.

I want to do remote installs, using vnc, on headless machines. I have tried this feature out a little on machines that have keyboard and display using local and network installation media and being able to control an install from the comfort of my own desk was a great boon. I would now like to be able to do installs on machines where I just plug in a power and network cable and floppy of CD.

What I really want is a way to start an installation with the further option 'vnc=1 vncpassword=whatever' passed as the default install option, using either a floppy or CD.

Are there any tools to help me build such boot installation media?

Install the package 'autoyast2'. Docs are in /usr/share/docs/packages/autoyast2 Run YaST from 'yast autoyast'. Here's a (partial but working) GRUB menu.lst that I used to install SuSE Linux 9.1: #dhcp bootp gfxmenu (nd)/9.1/message color white/blue black/light-gray default 2 timeout 8 title Installation - Automatic with SSH kernel (nd)/9.1/linux insmod=tulip UseSSH=1 SSHPassword=123 autoyast=http://10.0.0.1/pub/suse/profiles/ install=http://10.0.0.1/pub/suse/i386/9.1 vga=0x31A splash=silent showopts initrd (nd)/9.1/initrd (Kmail wrapped the long line starting with 'kernel (nd)/... into 3 lines). You need to install tftpboot on the server, copy boot/loader/{linux,initrd} to tftpboot/9.1/. Boot the client via GRUB with previous menu.lst or with a GRUB boot floppy with prior menu.lst on it. See http://www.suse.de/~nashif/autoinstall/ for a GRUB bootfloppy and instructions. BTW, installing remotely can be a tricky task if the boot process fails. Unless there is someone on the other side in case of boot failure, or you have physical access to the 'remote' client, you're pretty much lost in such a case (I was). Cheers, Leen