Advice on remote kernel changes?

[Peter Holm <pholm@gmx.de>]

Hi,

are there any tutorials / packages out there that address the
situation of patching / upgrading / changing the installed kernel
remotely?

three main problems come to my mind that could bring a fatal situation
of not being able to access the machine after a reboot: 

A kernel does not work with hardware for any reason and machine hangs
B kernel / modules do not work with network device for any reason. 
C kernel does not start sshd for any reason

How would one prevent this? 

is it possible to reboot old kernel automatically

A if system boot does not finish properly
B if modules for net-devices are missing / not working
C if the new one does not start all services (esp. sshd) 

Are there any solutions to this out there?

B + C could be resolved with some kind of script, I guess, but A seems
to be impossible to be done remotely? How do i change back lilo.conf,
if I have no ssh.login to the machine? 

I was looking for a "boot kernel-new only once, next time boot old
kernel", that could help, but I did not found this? Any ideas? 


Thank you very much for your attention! 




Have a nice thread,
Peter