Install F10 on a machine that has no CD/DVD drive, i.e. VPS

[Kevin Kofler]

Gabriel - IP Guys wrote:
> I'm sorry for the title. It is a challenge that I have at the moment. We
> have some VPS(s) 6 in total, and I wish to upgrade the distro that comes
> with them.

What technology is being used on the VPSs? And do you control the host
machine(s) or just the VMs in them?

If they're running Virtuozzo or OpenVZ, then you can't upgrade the kernel
inside the VMs because they use the host kernel, and current userspace most
likely won't run too great with an ancient FC3 kernel. If you control the
host machine, you can upgrade the host kernel too though. But if you just
rent the VPSs (i.e. the VMs) from another company, you can't touch the
kernel.

Fedora is not a good choice for Virtuozzo/OpenVZ due to this issue. You'd be
better off using CentOS - you wouldn't have to upgrade as often and your
userspace would most likely stay in sync with the kernel on the VPSs' host.


As for your actual question, you can do a HD install: download the DVD ISO
into a partition you're not going to format (needs to be ext2/ext3),
download the vmlinuz and initrd.img files from the pxeboot directory on the
mirrors, register them in GRUB and tell Anaconda the location of your ISO
on the HDD. But you can't do such a reinstall in a Virtuozzo/OpenVZ VM
(except maybe with some special ISO where some packages are replaced or
added to support the nonstandard environment, Fedora does not support it).
You can do it in any fully-virtualized and some paravirtualized VMs though,
e.g. it's possible in Xen (even paravirtualized Xen), KVM, VirtualBox,
VMWare etc., and of course you can do it on the bare hardware. (If you use
Xen, be warned though that Fedora 10 does NOT include a Xen Dom0 kernel. If
you want to run Fedora 10 on a Xen host machine, you need to use either an
experimental pv_ops Dom0 kernel which is not part of Fedora yet or an old
Dom0 kernel, e.g. from Fedora 8 or CentOS 5. Xen guest operations (DomU)
are fully supported by the Fedora 10 kernel though.)

        Kevin Kofler