fresh install over ssh

[Avi Greenbury]

Patrick Asselman wrote:
> There is no rescue environment yet. The box has an ILO but as far as
> i know that does not give you a full linux shell environment. There
> is also an unused disk, so I thought of using that. So now the
> general idea is to use debootstrap to install a chroot environment
> on the new disk first, then reboot into that, and repeat the process
> on the original boot partition to get the 64 bit stuff on there.
> (The extra disk is meant to be a swap disk eventually).

That all sounds good, though as an aside I do question the need for
swap generally, let alone spending an entire drive bay on it :) 

> Are there any things to watch out for (especially Grub-related
> things?)

It's been a while since I last used debootstrap, but I recall it
being tedious more than difficult. At worst you can chroot into the
new environment and treat it as if you'd booted straight onto it.

> It sounds like I should probably test this on a VM at home first, to
> get a bit more comfortable with the whole procedure. Especially Grub
> is something i'm not familiar with at all, but I'm glad it does not
> sound impossible :-)

Yeah, you shouldn't need to do anything directly with grub, but it's
definitely worth playing with it for a bit first. Perhaps even
configure the new system on a VM then rsync the volume onto the disk
on the server, before chrooting into it and installing grub? That
would assume no unusual hardware on the server.

-- 
Avi