Remote CentOS installation

Thu, 12 Mar. 2009     Thomas Bendler     ~ 1 min to read

CentOS, RedHat, and other RedHat based distributions offer the possibility to install the operating system remotely via VNC. All you have to do is to add the following line to the boot prompt:

> vnc headless ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0

To protect your installation you can use a password for the VNC connection with this line:

> vnc vncpassword=YOURPASSWORD headless ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0

Or you might want to combine this with an automatic install so you have a remote monitor for the automatic installation:

> vnc vncpassword=YOURPASSWORD headless ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0 ks=https://some.server.tld/ks.cfg

With this possibilities you can do the next step and combine this with PXE and static DHCP and … to get a fully unattended automated install method without the need to be onside at no time (when someone else plugin in the server at the datacenter and provides you the MAC address).



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