[App_rpt-users] Remote reinstall..... Ideas.. (Bryan Taylor)

[Pawlowski, Adam]

Some of the embedded/junk devices I have worked with in the past treat the system image like a default item that gets expanded into memory when the system boots. So, you could take a base system image of whatever unix flavor you were dealing with and it would always be whatever that was, expanded into memory. 

At that point you would need to store your configuration files somewhere else so that it can load them. Possibly, you could network boot the appliance as well so that it loaded a strap image and came up via an image housed elsewhere. 

That presents some problem when you do that, namely in that the configuration for the system has to be somewhere where you can get at it, or you've rebooted to an image that doesn't do you anything.

Of course this depends on when you'd want to do this or why - in the case of appliances I've worked with it has been because you want the base image of the system to be a known item, and only selected things are user configurable. I'm not sure that applies here to the majority of app_rpt users but that would certainly be easy-mode. As well there isn't usually a use case to revert the system back to default but in the case of commercial equipment that has one purpose maybe you do want to reset it to something other than a brick.

Driving around to issue DTMF or rcon commands into the unit resulting in it rebooting doesn't really make sense.

What is the use case?