Damien, Had you quoted properly, responding would have been easier. On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 damien.selles@eu.effem.com wrote:
My approach to this is rather simpler, and I'll implement it sometime Real Soon Now(tm). I've got the hard drive before the NIC in the boot order in BIOS. On a new PC, there's no bootable MBR so the machine skips the hard drive and boots from the NIC. When you want to reinstall a machine all you have to do is make the hard drive unbootable: 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1' before a reboot should do the trick - this bit I haven't tested yet...
And what if your boot disk crashes.. ? or even our MBR crashes...
your system will re install automatically.. without warning... (and maybe making you loose some data.)?
I wouldn't contemplate doing it on my servers. But on clients? There aren't any data there, by definition, and a reinstall is the easy and quick solution to the problem anyway unless there's a hardware failure and then it doesn't matter. It all depends on your setup, of course.
Don't you think Fabian's process allow you a better control over "re- installation"?
It does. My solution exists right now, Fabian's might exist in the future. Bjørn -- Bjørn Tore Sund Phone: (+47) 555-84894 Stupidity is like a System administrator Fax: (+47) 555-89672 fractal; universal and Math. Department Mobile: (+47) 918 68075 infinitely repetitive. University of Bergen VIP: 81724 teknisk@mi.uib.no Email: bjornts@mi.uib.no http://www.mi.uib.no/