FAI

[Florent Vuillemin]

Hi, here is more information about the points I mentioned :

> What I don't understand is, why do you want to distribute the base.tgz
> files on mirrors, and not just create them with make-fai-nfsroot and put
> it where it is now, just with a nametag for the distribution it is meant
> for?

At the moment I'm using several base.tgz as a temporary solution to
adapt the other scripts, as it did not require further development. I
agree with you on the fact that it's "lighter" and more evolutive to
make the server build its own required base.tgz

> Can smartpm bootsrap a base system for rpm based distribution? That
> would be an interesting feature.

I tried to make a Fedora bootstrap from Mandriva using smartpm bu I
experienced several problems :
- I did not manage to use the package groups
(ftp://ftp.cru.fr/pub/linux/fedora/core/4/i386/os/repodata/)
- SmartPM did not want to install a list of packages when one of them
was not found
As I couldn't find much documentation, I decided to wait a little and
concentrate on other points.
However, SmartPM (and Make a chroot, that I didn't know) really look
interesting for our needs.

> Ack. rcS fai should generally be the same for any distribution,
> distribution specific parts should be run depending on the variable
> FAI_DISTRIBUTION mentioned above.

That is what I did :)
When rcS fai has to execute different actions depending on the
distribution, I added a case on the $DISTRIBUTION variable.

> > - Packages : at the moment, I'm working on the rpms installation (how
> > to parse the package_config files and use package groups with Yum).
> > When this is ok, I will also adapt the post-config files and FAI
> > should be able to install redhat systems (I'm testing with an RHEL3)
> 
> This sounds great. How is your progress there? do you need help? I can
> only help with stuff that can be done with free software, as I can't
> afford any RHEL license. Probably I could do the same work with centos.

This part is nearly over now: I use a perl script inspired from fai's
install_packages to list the RPM packages to install, and call use yum
to install them. There is not yet support for package groups but, as a
temporary solution, I create a sed script to transform the comps.xml
file into package lists to place in fai/package_config/ (one file for
each group).

I will now adapt the post-config files, and the installation process
might for RHEL might work  this evening !

Florent