hiya Just some quick thoughts on faimond & faimond-gui.
1) The variable "monserver" could use some explanation. Currently I set this variable via the pxeboot command line. This works, but is a bit clumsy. Maybe there is a better solution, but at the moment I just need "a" solution. I could ignore setting this variable, because the fai-server is the monitoring server - but I'd like to be able to separate them. 2) "faimond -b" is a bit too restrictive. Using fai-chboot I am able to specify a custom directory, but faimond calls fai-chboot without "-D". (My tftp config directory is "/srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg") I worked around this by creating a symlink /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg -> /srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg. (Reason: My tftp server contains more then fai.) 3) However I'm not convinced that faimond should have the "-b" functionality at all. Using "-b" (which is a nice feature) implies that faimond is located on the same server as the tftp-server _and_ fai-server. Furthermore if you intend to use faimond-gui, then this also implies this server being a X client. Maybe it's just me, but to me this smells of bad design because a lot of functionality must be concentrated in one place. Possible change: - split faimond+faimond-gui into a separate package - let fai-server recommend faimond-package - introduce a new option which calls a hook Benefit: 1) monitoring fai can be separated into a totally disjunctive server installing faimond does not require you to install: nfs, dhcp & tftp 2) faimond can be made more flexible hook may call fai-chboot with custom options hook may contain a ssh-script which executes fai-chboot on different server hook may send a mail "install has finished" hook may update a flag in a database 4) faimond-gui doesn't work (for me). I wrote a small init-script which runs faimond as a background process. When installing a server some progress information gets written to /var/log/faimond.log. But when I execute faimond-gui /var/log/faimond.log then nothing happens at all. Too make sure it is not related to the fai-server I installed the fai-server package onto my desktop box and copied the logfile. perl-tk is installed, X is running properly. faimond-gui does nothing (visible). The manpage is telling me to run "faimond | faimond-gui -", but I don't want to start faimond manually. The logfile and "-b" are more important to me then a pretty window. process list: /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/faimond -d -T -b log file: Tue Mar 30 17:05:38 2010 - FAI monitoring daemon starting.. Tue Mar 30 17:05:38 2010 - FAI monitoring daemon started on port 4711 with pid 27581 Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda check Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda TASKBEGIN confdir Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda TASKEND confdir 0 Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda TASKBEGIN setup Tue Mar 30 17:12:09 2010 - belinda TASKEND setup 0 [...] Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - belinda HOOK savelog.LAST.source Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - belinda TASKBEGIN savelog Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - belinda TASKEND savelog 0 Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - 10.255.128.134:58607: Disabling pxelinux configuration for belinda # faimond-gui /var/log/faimond.log ^C # cat /var/log/faimond.log |faimond-gui - ^C
