I have two servers I have just retrieved from their regular home in a data centre some distance away. (Less tha opportune interventions by the staff there meant they would not accept remote logins).
While I have them here I want to upgrade them to 7.0 (i386). But one is 2.0, the other 3.0 at present. It looks as though they will not boot from their USB ports, the CD-ROM drives seem not to be DVD-compatible (and I'm not sure I can find any blank CD-ROM disks). They have floppy drives, but I'm not sure I have a working floppy drive on a working machine any more. I have both the machines running normally, and I've backed up everything I need to keep. Is there a way of upgrading these machines by placing initial installation files on their hard drives, say in a /altboot directory, bootin from there and doing the rest over NFS or FTP? I have to do an install because I think both machines need new boot blocks to even boot newer releases. I also need to change the disk layout to add more swap space and create /tmp on disk rather than in an MFS. I am under time pressure because these two machines form the backbone of live 24/7/365 services, now being run on VPSs in their absence. -- Steve Blinkhorn <[email protected]>
