Preupgrading headless remote systems

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht
<wolfgang.rupprecht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Robert Myers <rbmyersusa at gmail.com> writes:
>> On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 8:44 AM, Steve Berg <sberg at mississippi.com> wrote:
>>> So far I've had very good luck with preupgrade for 12 to 14 and 13 to 14
>>> systems.  There's one annoyance that is causing me some headache.  I have
>>> a couple of systems that are headless and remote that I'd like to do a
>>> preupgrade on but I can't seem to get things started without some local
>>> keyboard interaction.
>>>
>>> I need let preupgrade and/or anaconda know that it's supposed to use eth0
>>> (some systems have more than one NIC).  And I need to specify the language
>>> and keyboard layouts from within preupgrade and or the grub entry that
>>> launches the upgrade.
>>>
>>> Currently I run preupgrade and then manually tweak /boot/grub/grub.conf to
>>> load the 14 installer automatically with a vnc session waiting for a
>>> connection.  But this only happens after I locally tell the system to use
>>> English, a US keyboard and (sometimes) eth0.  It's causing me to hold off
>>> on upgrading some systems until I can prove that I can get the 14
>>> installer to launch all the way into the VNC session being ready with no
>>> local interaction necessary.
>>>
>>
>> Maybe I'm missing something:
>
> One some computers preupgraded needs handholding after the first reboot.
> In my case 3 of the 6 computer upgradede from f13 to f14 asked me to
> acknowledge the network settings.  I might addd that it had guessed the
> the settings correctly, it just wanted me to confirm them (eth0, dhcp
> for ipv4, and the standard RFC automatic config for ipv6).
>

I just completed FC13->FC14 on a remote machine without touching the
remote keyboard.  Maybe the fact that there was a keyboard physically
attached made the difference, but I suspect that something else--VNC,
maybe--is causing the problem.

Once the machine was rebooted, I just ssh'd into the machine, which is
now running FC14.

Robert.