Stephen Carter Retrac Networking Limited Ph: +44 (0)7870 218 693 Fax: +44 (0)870 7060 056 CNA, CNE, CNS, CCNA, MCP

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Mike Dewhirst <miked@dewhirst.com.au> 05/25/05 6:58 AM >>> Scott Leighton wrote: On Tuesday 24 May 2005 9:39 pm, Chadley Wilson wrote:

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On Tuesday 24 May 2005 14:06, David McMillan wrote:

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Scott Leighton wrote:

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I've done some googling on headless installs and have only been able to find references to SLES having that capability by using pxe and VNC.

Does anyone know whether or not it is possible to do a headless install of 9.3 Pro, and if so, where there might be a howto on the subject?

Or 9.1 Pro, if I may be forgiven for piggybacking....

Use remote administration in yast to configure server, and install rdesktop on client. Connect like you would in vnc, else use ssh for just the cammand line, and you can run yast in a terminal.

I can't see how that can possibly work. Enabling remote administration in Yast would require that the headless machine have SuSE installed on it so I could enable it.

I know how to remotely administer, what I don't know is how to remotely install a new install to a headless box that is 3000 miles away from me in a datacenter that I have no physical access to. If I'm misunderstanding what you are suggesting, please do clear it up for me.

Scott

WIthout the datacentre providing a method of remote access to the box at the bios level it's not possible. For example, HP servers commonly use Integrated Lights Out boards that let you re-direct the floppy & CD/DVD drive of your local PC to the remote server, at which point you hard remotely hard reset the box, and it will boot using installation disc in your PC. You can also hard reset the box and access the BIOS menu using this method. The nice part is you access their boxes through a web browser which makes is very easy to manage remote boxes ni any state. I've also used Avocent KVM's which will give you remote keyboard, mouse and screen access but not removable media re-direction which wouldn't be any good in this case. The datacenter may have some other method and many will install a base OS for you, although they usually specify what OS's they are willing to install. It may be worth asking them what options you have available, as this is not an OS issue if I understand correctly.