OpenBSD 3.9 remote installation

[Nick Guenther]

On 5/7/06, Leines <openbsd at leines.net> wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> thank you for your quick answer. I see, I have to write a bit more abou it.
>
> The machine we talk about is hosted by a professional provider. There is NO
> WAY to get physical access to it. Well, it is easy to convince them to
> insert a CD, but they are professionals and I don't want to pay that money
> ;-) The reasons I don't want to are simple and there are two of them: It
> SHOULD work (*), I see no point that it is impossible. Second is, if the
> server crashes and I want to reinstall it, I need to pay again. No good :-)
>
> To be more exact: I have access to a shell console to this machine. I can
> "watch" while the system boots. I can logon to a ssh-encrypted connection
> and have keyboard access to the machine.

Oh, one of those things... the video card that pretends to be a
keyboard and also gives webaccess.

>
> I can also reinstall Debian and some other Linux systems on demand for free
> (automatic reinstall, controlled by hosters webpage) as often as I want to.
>
> I can also boot into a recovery system which allows me to fix the system
> (Linux), if something goes wrong on Linux. So I have some kind of access to
> the machine which makes me believe that (*) (see above).
>
> So I just want to know how to start the OpenBSD 3.9 boot disk on this
> machine. Can I copy the bootdisk into the bootsector (well, I tried, it did
> not worked, but perhaps someone here has an idea...)?
>
> Again,.. : thank you all in advance.
>
> Leines

Are you able to set it to boot via pxe? If you could do that, you
could set up a server at your house and somehow convince the thing to
boot via pxe AND via your specified server.

The man pages at http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi are very helpful.

-Nick