One way to upgrade a cluster of RH 7.3 computers to RH9 without a
CD-ROM drive is to use one of your own computers as a NFS server.  Copy
the RH9 distribution to a directory you make for them on a shared
partition.  You can get the three shrike-i386-disc*.iso files
(corresponding to three installation CD-ROMs) and the MD5SUM file to
check their validity from, say,
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i386/ or a mirror.  For RH9
the NFS installation can be done directly from the .iso files, just by
pointing the installer to the computer and directory with the three files.
The installation is done using floppies. First boot with the bootdisk one
and then use the drvnet one.  The floppies can be made from files in
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/images/. Read the
README in that directory and see the RH9 Installation Guide at, say,
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide.
    This assumes you have floppy drives.  If you don't, it's still
possible to do an NFS installation.  I think it would work to copy
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/images/pxeboot/
initrd.img and vmlinuz into some directory you make on each computer
you want to upgrade.  As an example, let's call the directory /RH9,
suppose your root is the /dev/hda2 partition, and assume you're using
grub.  For this example one would add to /boot/grub/grub.conf

title Install RH9
   root (hd0,1)
   kernel /RH9/vmlinuz
   initrd /RH9/initrd.img

Then reboot and select the "Install RH9" choice.

Steven Yellin

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Ping Yeh wrote:

> Hello,
>
>      I have a cluster of Red Hat 7.3 boxes and I'm planning to
> migrate to SL 3.0.4 for now (and SL 4.0 when appropriate).
> However, the documentation on 7.2->SL says I should do a 2-step
> upgrade: first upgrade to RH 9 with CD-ROM, then upgrade to
> SL with yum.  Because I don't have CD-ROM drives on my nodes,
> this is not very convenient.
>
>      I tried to use rpm to install yum-conf-30x.SL.noarch.rpm,
> but it needs "--force" to ignore the conflicts with files of
> old yum.  Then "yum -c /etc/yum.conf.304 update yum" produces
> the error messages below:
>
> Error getting file
> ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/304/i386/errata/SL/RPMS/headers/header.info
> [Errno 4] IOError: [Errno ftp error] [Errno ftp error] 500 Illegal PORT command.
>
> Any advices on how to proceed is appreciated!
>
> Regards,
> Ping
>