Graphical install of RHEL-3 on headless server

[Charles Steinkuehler]

I'm finally getting around to updating a couple of my personal server 
systems (headless 1U intel boxes with serial console redirection and no 
floppy/hdd) which are currently running RedHat 7.3.

I've upgraded in text mode before without having to open the box and 
attach a CD-ROM (just copy the kernel and initrd image from the boot CD 
to the running system's /boot partition and properly add a new boot menu 
option to lilo/grub), but with the RH installer, I can't setup to run 
LVM when installing in text mode. :<

Fortunately, there's a nifty solution.  The RHEL-3 installer now 
supports graphical installation via VNC.  After configuring enough 
network information for the system to get an IP and mount an NFS share, 
the VNC server starts up.  Then I can simply fire up a VNC client, 
connect to the system, and see both the graphical install screen and the 
serial console window (pretty dull once the GUI installer starts up), 
and install graphically just like normal.

There's also support for connecting to a remote X server, but I haven't 
tried that yet.

This might be old-hat, as I'm not sure if other disto's have done this, 
but it seems pretty cool to me. :)

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net