In certain situations where you don’t have physical access to your server it can be quite helpful to know how to install a new os without physical media like CD/DVD/USB or pxe.

This brief example shows you, how to bootstrap a rootserver (that of course already has a linux os installed that you can access through ssh) to install Fedora 15.

First, you’ll need the initial ramdisk and the kernel images:

cd /boot/
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/isolinux/initrd.img
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/isolinux/vmlinuz

Next, you add a new boot target to your grub.conf:

[...]
 title Fedora Install
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /vmlinuz vnc vncpassword=SECRET ksdevice=eth0 ks=http://server/ks.cfg
  initrd /initrd.img

Don’t forget to change the boot target (default=n) in your grub.conf, too.

After rebooting the server, you can observe the installation process with your favourite vnc viewer.

click for full size image