On Tue, 5 Sep 95 16:53:15 BST 
 David Alan Gilbert <gilbertd@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:

 > We only have the one disc; which is pretty short on space.
 > I can make the space, but what worries me is how to replace
 > critical binaries like shells and libraries and the like while
 > the machine is dependant on them.  Now on any other setup I'd
 > probably boot off another device while I fiddled around - but 
 > there isn't another convenient device.

Umm ... well, one thing you might do is boot the new kernel into 
single-user, manually NFS-mount a fileserver containing the tarballs, and 
then use `tar --unlink -zxvpf /path/to/tarball.tar.gz' from `/' to 
install them ... note that tar and gzip are statically linked to help 
with this.

You might also consider netbooting the system from another machine and 
then untarring the snapshot onto the disk...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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