[PLUG] A _Red Hat_ upgrade question

Karl M. Hegbloom karlheg at hegbloom.net
Fri Aug 30 09:07:15 UTC 2002


Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com> writes:

> On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Rich Shepard wrote:
> 
> > It would sure save a ton of time if I didn't need to reselect the
> > packages for a fourth time but could use a saved configuration
> > file.
> 
> After a successful Red Hat 7.3 installation, there'll be a file
> named /root/anaconda-ks.cfg that can be used to duplicate your
> installation. (Of course, then you'd have to learn about
> kickstarting a host, which takes a bit of time.)

How much information does that "kickstart" file contain?  Does it know
how you've configured those installed packages, your networking, etc,
or does it merely contain the list of packages to install?

With "dpkg", you can say "dpkg --get-selections", and get a list of
the packages that are installed as a specially formatted ascii text
file.  That file can then be used as standard input to "dpkg
--set-selections", after which you may run "apt-get dselect-upgrade"
to match that package list.  It looks like "aptitude" also might have
at least the rudiments of this sort of ability.

There is an "autoinstall" package that comes from Progeny.  It's not
really "right" yet... it's still somewhat prototypical in many ways,
and fails to work on some hardware since they used a nonstandard
floppy disk format for the boot floppy.  (It's initrd is too big to
fit with a kernel on a 1.44 MB diskette, so they used a larger
diskette format ala "superformat".)

The cool thing that "autoinstall" does is to get a dump of the
"debconf" database on the machine you want to clone, and then preload
that on the new box, and run the install with DEBIAN_FRONTEND set to
"noninteractive".  One problem is that not all packages have been
debconfsicated...  There is much work to be done in this area.

-- 
As any limb well and duly exercised, grows stronger,
the nerves of the body are corroborated thereby. --I. Watts.  .''`.
 Debian -- The blue collar Linux distribution.               : :' :
 <URL:http://www.debian.org/social_contract>		     `. `'




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