Headless installation?

[acranox]

Hi all,
I'm building myself a little NAS box. I don't have a monitor, and at the moment, a keyboard neither.
If I used the desktop live CD the thing boots up and gets a IP address from my router, but openssh isn't running, so I can't access the box. The server CD doesn't seem to boot automatically.
Does anyone have any ideas how I can get this thing to boot in a way that will allow any level of remote access to it? I've got a USB stick, maybe I could make an image on that. I'm not 100% that the motherboard supports USB booting though.
Maybe my best bet it to use another distro's live CD which includes ssh access, and then do the ubuntu install from there?

--Peter

[earthpigg]

willing to try BSD instead of Linux?

FreeNAS is designed for exactly this...


...i'm not sure about ssh being enabled by default, though.

http://www.freenas.org/

[acranox]

willing to try BSD instead of Linux?

FreeNAS is designed for exactly this...


...i'm not sure about ssh being enabled by default, though.

http://www.freenas.org/


Well, that kind of side-steps the question, but it does look like an interesting distro. ZFS support caught my eye.
I oversimplified when I said I was building a NAS box. That's just going to be it's main role. I also want it to be a router, print server, possible media center, and it needs to support modern hardware (nVidia ION + Intel Atom) Plus I'm just trying to hone my linux skills. So I'm not sure BSD is the way to go.

[night_fox]

could you install ssh without the monitor by doing ctrl+alt+F1 on the live cd.

[acranox]

could you install ssh without the monitor by doing ctrl+alt+F1 on the live cd.

I could. But I'll still need a keyboard for that.

[acranox]

I'm trying the method here currently.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/NetworkConsole