Last month I went about “upgrading” my old fileserver, an aging Redhat 9 system to something a little bit more modern 8-), and redeploy it as a more powerful firewall box. The hardware is still very usable by today’s standards, a 1.7GHz Athlon processor, so I set about to do the installation. This system has never had a monitor permanently attached to it so I took this opportunity to try out an installation method that I had only toyed with a few times before. I’m talking about using VNC to do a remote install.
To get started I poped the CentOS 5.3 DVD in and gave this system a quick reboot. Now you know how I said this system didn’t have a monitor permanently attached. Well I lied. It does sorta kinda sorta have a monitor but it’s through a KVM switch which just so happens to be the same KVM as my primary desktop/workstation, so I didn’t want to have to keep switching back and forth, hence why I decided to do the install via VNC.
On to the install …
To start I flipped the KVM over so I could view this system’s console just to get things started. Once I got to the initial CentOS install screen I gave it a boot command like this:
1 | linux vnc vncconnect=<workstation's hostname> |
I then switched the KVM back to the desktop/workstation’s console and started up ssvnc in listening mode. Here’s the Options dialog from ssvnc which will configure ssvnc to start in listening mode, without any encryption.
NOTE: If you’ve never heard of ssvnc then check it out. It’s a extremely nice VNC client/server that runs on Linux, Windows, and OSX!
Once the Options dialog is set I clicked the Listen button in ssnvc’s main gui
Finally you’ll be presented with ssvnc’s transcript window
After all this I was finally presented with the initial CentOS 5 installation window.
For further details these links to dklevine.com & this redhat magazine article proved useful.
June 7th, 2009, @ 11:04 pm |
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