On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 08:56:29PM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have two machines sitting in a data center. One of them, I've just > finished, very carefully, configuring for production use. > > The other machine I've used a bit as a sandbox for trying things before > doing them on the production machine - and at this point the sandbox is > pretty well messed up. > > I'd like to either > a. rebuild from scratch to Sarge > b. upgrade to a clean testing release. > either way, without a trip to the datacenter to rebuild from a CD. > > So... is there some easy way to do a remote rebuild of a machine that > already has a (still) reasonably functioning base system on it? > I did this with a couple of Red Hat servers a few years ago. They were located in a server room at the university and I did not have a key, but wanted to do the rebuild over the weekend to minimize disruption. Anyhow, what I did was to transfer all necessary data (e.g., home directories, mail spools, etc, which I don't think are an issue in your case) to another server. I then disabled the swap partition and bootstrapped a base Debian install (*with* ssh, which is not part of the base install, IIRC) and set the boot loader to look for the kernel in the new base partition. I rebooted and logged in to the new Debian base install. Then I nuked the rest of the disk (in my case also repartitioned while the system was running, which is not for the faint of heart). I installed a new base system on the newly nuked disk and reinstalled the boot loader to boot from the new system. Once that was done, I nuked the old swap partition back into a swap partition and then went about installing whatever packages I needed. Note, that this whole procedure requires a fair degree of intestinal fortitude and knowing what you are doing, as one mistake can reneder the system completely inaccessible by remote means. If you have any more specific questions, please let me know. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature