Headless installation (w/o monitor and keyboard, over ssh)

[hedwards]

No, the environment I had in mind is a SOHO of non-IT-nerds. It would also work in more advanced networks of hobbyists and professionally managed network environments, but these can easily create such thing themself, taylored to their specific needs and likings.

Which, IMHO, is asking for trouble. Having something for non-IT nerds can be hard, but is definitely not impossible, but trying to do it headless is just a level of complexity that's not at all necessary. The non-IT nerds are going to be significantly less able/willing to trouble shoot that mess if it ever breaks, especially given how many ways systems can break that would disrupt some combination of VNC, SSH or the net stack in general.

If it were me, I'd use partition management software that can send data over the network and either a live USB drive or virtual machine to interact with it. Or just copy what Raspberry Pi does, except set it up to automatically write to blank disks. But, whatever you do, there's going to be an unnecessarily high risk of various bad things happening.

 

[monwarez]

If you want a headless install, then why not just use cloudready images ?

Index of /releases/VM-IMAGES/15.0-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/

 

[Mjölnir]

If you want a headless install, then why not just use cloudready images ?

IIUC there is some tweaking to conform to the respective cloud environments? These might end up on my standard machine in a non-cloud environment, and I'm going to wonder "where does the setting of this knob come from? I've never seen this before...". But if you tell me that eventually these images perform a standard installl w/o any specialties, i.e. the result is 100% equal to an installation with the default standard non-cloud install image, then thx a lot, I tried to solve a problem a 2nd time w/o beeing aware of the 1st.