Remote Replacement of OS

[mwatkins]

Greetings; on the old forums I answered lots of questions but am not sure I ever asked one. Here goes the first...

I have an aging old box co-located a million miles away that I'm about to have shipped to another co-lo provider only slightly closer. I've moved all my apps and data off to a temporary VPS server and want to refresh this box with a brand new OS install.

Currently the box is running FreeBSD 4.11 Stable.

I'd like to run the latest FreeBSD stable on the machine. It has three disks; I've moved anything I might like to keep around onto one of the three (which serves only a backup purpose, no other role) and I have off-machine backups as well if "all goes horribly wrong".

I'd like to do it all remotely.

I've no idea what the support will be like in the new co-lo center; my current provider I've been with for a decade and I know they'd willingly pop a CD into the machine if it gets stuck; for now I'm assuming that willing help is hard to come by at the new place.

Thus I'd like to do it all remotely in a manner which is unlikely to require remote helping hands. I am however prepared to risk it anyway and pay the piper so to speak.

Given that I don't want or need to keep ANYTHING on the box, is there a *replacement* path, not an upgrade, that I can take which is relatively fail safe?