Installing Gentoo over SSH

Message

Jerle · Post by **Jerle** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 1:37 am

I have a pair of servers co-located in New York, and the administator there has no experience with Gentoo. The gentoo LiveCD allows you to SSH, FTP, and do all sorts of outbound connections before you have finished installing the system, but I haven't seen any method of connecting in.

Is it possible to SSH in to a computer that has been booted from a LiveCD? Probably not by default, but if there is some way to rig that it would make things much easier if I could control the install remotely.

Thanks for any help.

dna42 · Post by **dna42** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 2:09 am

as far as i know, as soon as there is a connection to the internet, it is perfectly possible to start the ssh server, which (i guess) can be found on any gentoo live-cd.
in fact, you can tell him the exact steps required to achieve this (i.e. modprobe ....; ifup ....; etc) and continue the installlation as soon as the ssh daemon is running...
p.s: be sure to make a good password before starting an ssh server (with the default settings)

Post by **pjp** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 3:03 am

Could've sworn I read something about this. If you get it done, please take notes and consider posting them to the Documentation, Tips & Tricks forum.

abhishek · Post by **abhishek** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 11:43 pm

I've done this vefore. all that is nesscary is to do the following after you login

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passwd 
/etc/init.d/sshd start

and it should work.

dberkholz · Post by **dberkholz** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:15 am

andrd wrote:I've done this vefore. all that is nesscary is to do the following after you login
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passwd 
/etc/init.d/sshd start
and it should work.

I have a computer with no keyboard, mouse or monitor. I'd like to install Gentoo on it via SSH, and I have access to its CD and floppy drives.

What I'd like to do is get the effects of the above commands onto a bootable CD.

Any ideas on how to do that and then how to create the bootable CD would be greatly appreciated.

StuBear · Post by **StuBear** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:55 am

To do what you want you would need the livecd to have a default root password and have the livecd start sshd at boot time.

To add a default root password you will need to mount the iso image on a loop device

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mount -o loop livecd.iso /mnt/cdrom

You will then need to mount the cloop image which contains the live fielsystem in compressed form - you will probably need to emerge cloop first and lsmod the cloop module before you acn mount it. I'm not sure whether you can right to a mounted cloop image - never tried.

Your best bet may be to mount the cloop image and then to chroot to it. Then you can run passwd and rc-update add sshd default to set the passwd and to start sshd at boot time.

Unmount the cloop and the isoimage and hopefully your boot disk will now have a default root password and start sshd. Note this is all dependant on being able to write to a mounted cloop image.

Another option would be to emerge livecd-ng and create your own live cd or plug a keyboard and monitor into the server for the few minutes it takes to boot the cd, create a passwd and start sshd

dberkholz · Post by **dberkholz** » Fri May 02, 2003 7:24 am

Thanks StuBear, sounds like some great ideas. I'll give them a try as soon as I have Internet access on a computer with Gentoo. I'm doubtful of the ability to write to the cloop image, since AFAIK there's no way to write to a mounted ISO, and I don't know how to make a new CD bootable if I start copying things out of the ISO to other places. livecd-ng sounds like it may be a better option. If I had a keyboard or mouse, I certainly would plug them in (my other computer is a laptop).