Ubuntu install using NFS

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2021 at 23:15, Jerry Geis <jerry.geis at gmail.com> wrote:

Your quoting is broken and makes this very hard to follow. Note that I
am using Gmail as well; it's easy to do proper quoting in Gmail's web
interface.

Click the 3 vertical dots at bottom right and pick "plain text".

Press Ctrl-A to select all; this expands the quoted text. Then just
insert your replies after what you're responding do, and delete the
rest.

> Is this physical hardware, or a VM? - Physical - but test with VM.

Ouch. This is _much_ easier with VMs. I am not surprised at all if it
worked in a VM but not on physical H/W.

> Is this machine in your home, or office, or a server room somewhere,  - many states away internet access

Argh. Worse still.

> or in a rack in a datacentre, or what? not rack - just in "rooms"

And even worse than that.

> Is it a BIOS or UEFI machine? BIOS

Oh my. This is starting to sound impossible toe, TBH.

> If it is in a remote site does that remote site not have a PXE net - NO
> boot server or something?   Boot server

You conflated 2 lines here, so I am not sure. Without UEFI and a local
PXE boot server, I am not sure this is possible at all.

> Is there any OS on the machine at the moment?   yes there is linux running currently (CentOS)

OK. So Colin has given you pointers on how to gradually and slowly
replace the in-place distro with a new one, but I warn you, it sounds
very hard and complicated to me. I personally would not even try.

> How are you accessing the machine? THrough internet ssh

So you do not have even, say, a VPN into its local LAN?

> Any great ideas I'm missing to get live server install in 2G ram?

Er, yes. Don't try to remotely provision a bare-metal machine that is
not local to you if you do not have full remote control over the
hardware, e.g. an ILOM board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band_management

E.g. some kind of ILO card.

I don't think you can do this. Normally I'd suggest putting a
bare-metal hypervisor on the box, which would make it almost trivially
easy -- but in 2GB of RAM? Forget it. I doubt the free edition of ESXi
would even run on that.


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