Davor Ocelic, docelic+spinlocksolutions.com, Jun 16, 2004. Aug 8, 2004: add lilo -R step, and fix some formatting issues Jan 4, 2005: posted article to www.debian-administration.org site
To perform successful remote reboot (to upgrade the kernel usually), few things need to be taken into account:
image=/vmlinuz.new label=Newkernel append="panic=5 newkernel" read-only optionalThis will create a special image name to test the new kernel. panic=5 makes sure the kernel autoreboots on panic in 5 secods, and "newkernel" is an arbitrary "newinit"-like name we choose, so we can later check if we're in test phase or normal run. (If you didn't understand the last sentence, don't worry - just use the name "newkernel" as shown in the example).
update-rc.d testnet start 40 S .This will install a script that will test network connectivity once you reboot. This will handle cases where the kernel does not panic (it mounts the root filesystem at least), but then something goes wrong and it doesnt start up the network properly.
echo "support ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoersRun this little script to generate a random password for the account and print login/password info on the local console (you could copy it to a file and then run the file if you think it's more convenient):
makepasswd --crypt| perl -ne 'BEGIN{ ($p,$c) = split /\s+/, <STDIN>; `usermod -p $c support; echo ACCOUNT login/pwd is support/$p >> /etc/issue`; print "Temporary password for the support account is: $p/$c\n"; exit }'
lilo lilo -R newkernel