On 10/19/06, Thomas Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ok. First Ubuntu. Reinhard is preparing FAI 3.X version for ubuntu edgy. We hope that this version will be included into edgy. You can see the sources here: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/fai/people/siretart/
Attention! Take care not to mix up the task of "running a FAI Server on Ubuntu" for which these mentioned packages are necessary, and the task of "Installing an Ubuntu Server with FAI (more or less irrelevant what the FAI server distribution is, it's mainly configspace tweaking" So, Eddy, do you want to use a Debian or Ubuntu Server?
For other distribution (rpm based) this is how it's done. Use FAI 3.1 (will be released in a few days) or newer.
I successfully install Sarge, Etch, Ubuntu from a Sarge Server, with FAI 2.10.5, with no more than some Configspace tweaking, and only using the fai-make-base-tgz script which I have made available in the fai-distributions package - but this just helps making the base.tgz easily. Fedora is on the way, I have a config where the install runs through well enough, but for some reason the Xen domU I use for testing doesn't boot (have no better error message here in the office). I have no time currently to fix this, but it should be easy to do for somebody who know Fedory better than me.
You will still use a Debian (or Ubuntu) nfsroot that is easily create using the make-fai-nfsroot command. The difficult part is to create the base.tgz file for the other distributions.
Yeah, it's really hard to impossible to build a SuSE minmal chroot, at least if you consider minmal less than 580MB, which is what I get with yast dirinstall when chosing "minimal". This should be easier to do for people who know the distribution well. For Debian Etch and UBuntu my fai-distributions package as mentioned in the wiki does help. But the version from Subversion should be used, it contains the newest stuff, I can help with getting started with this if there are any questions.
Have a look at this url http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/FAI_multi-distribution It's a little bit outdated, because since FAI 3.0 there's a new subdirectory in the config space called basefiles/ where you should put your Centos or SLES or RHES base.tgz file.
That's not the main reason why it's outdatet. This is a nice additional feature, but not strictly necessary. I also posted some more comments on this to the devel list. Mostly, the current state is, that I do it without patching FAI itself, but only writing hooks, which makes it way easier for people to test that - only changes in configspace, not an extra FAI package is necessary. Anly fai-distributions, as said, which makes the things described above. For now, you can look at the configspace I uploaded with Xen examples: http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/images/b/b1/Fai-configspace.tar.gz It should work for real hardware when just defining the same classes, but without "XENU" Ask me, I can probably help to sort out most problems with that, and when I am at home, I can upload a newer config than this one.
The tool for installing packages (called install_packages) also nows how to install pacakges via rpm, urpm, yum and other methods. Have a look at the code.
Thomas, did you release a new version with the fix for the bug I found, lwhich otherwiese makes installation of packages for non-debian (or was it only yum?) packages impossible?
BTW, I happy about any feedback how this works and maybe you like to update the wiki pages concerning this topic.
Me also. These wiki pages where written by me, so I'd like to be involved in making them better. I invested quite some time in this, and will continue to do so. Help and bugreports are necessary to get it more smoothly. It's basically not hard to do if you know FAI, and the distribution you want to install, but often it takes a lot of time to fix stuff, test install, check logs, and again fix until you have it working. At least when doing it with Xen you don't have to run from one machine ot another... One interesting topic that occurs, which I already realized when setting up a quite simple demo config to show FAI installing multiple distributions, is, that it gets hard to sort the different classes for different distributions if you want to keep them in one configspace. But that's a problem that should be discussed on the developers list, when we have some input from users. It would be cool if Stephen Hermann, who reported to have done it with SuSE, could post some hints or at least the configspace (without confidential stuff) he used for these things, so his experiences can be added to a joint effort for makeing FAI a generic autoinstaller for all main distributions. Henning
