First version of NAIS is out.

[Jens Rühmkorf]

We are glad to announce that the first version of NAIS is out: 

http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/nais/

It has the same goal FAI has but with a different approach. FAI was
originally written by Mattias Gärtner, Thomas Lange, Jens Rühmkorf and is
now maintained by Thomas Lange. NAIS was written by Mattias Gärtner, Lech
Nieroda, Jens Rühmkorf with substantial support from Klaus Schiwinsky. 

This is the first public release, it has been tested to work for potato
since end of january. Some of its features include: 

* The Linux distribution you use for your server does not need to be
  Debian or even Potato. We have set up a fully functional server system
  on SuSE 6.3 as well as on Debian 2.1 using the same scripts.
  Based on debian's base2_2.tgz all needed packages are added in a chroot
  environment (this is a substantial feature needed to generate a feasible
  initrd.gz, refer to the documentation).

* You can use the same kernel for installation that you use for running
  the client. The kernel just needs additional ramdisk- and initrd-support
  compiled in as well as the network device support to work. 

* The use of initrd makes it possible to automatically install clients
  with "unusual" network interfaces, such as PCMCIA, whose support cannot
  be compiled into the kernel yet. NOTE: The initrd.gz we use does not
  support PCMCIA as it is, you have to add the needed binaries and modules
  yourself to make it work. 

* There is no second reboot required -- pretty much the same like some
  other distributions do it (and like Debian/GNU Linux did it for 1.3). 
  This is *really* good for testing. Booting and Installing can be done
  in *one run*, only when everything is verified to work you tell the
  client to boot a 2nd time.

* Like FAI it uses a convenient "class" concept for configuring.

* Mattias' tool setup_harddisks.pl lets you specify general rules for
  partitioning and formatting the client's local hard disks; preserving
  already created partitions is possible as well. 

* All parameters are passed to the client using DHCP.

* We took care to keep everything RFC-compliant so you should be able to 
  use etherboot, netboot, pxelinux or bpbatch to boot over network
  (e.g. netboot will fail when using bootp and ms=1024). If you
  have PXE-bootproms we would suggest using pxelinux (that comes with 
  syslinux) from H.P.Anvin, since it is free and most definitely you will
  not need the features bpbatch offers (well maybe bpbatch's "HdBoot" is 
  useful if you have both Windows and linux on one machine). If you use
  debian you have to get another TFTPd though, because the one that comes 
  with potato has too few features to work with pxelinux. Just use hpa's
  tftpd. 

* You can request your client via tcp to reboot, *at any time*, in case 
  the installation fails. Gets quite handy when the client you want to 
  install is 400 meters away and hangs for any reason (which of course 
  should not happen;) A small daemon simply listens on port 2323. 
  Thanks to Klaus Schiwinsky for this (and more). 

* A sysinfo mode that just gathers some significant information about 
  the client and gives you a shell (remember, "telnet client 2323"
  *instantly* reboots the client, so you can care less about the shell).
  Other modes possible but not implemented yet (well a "bash" mode, but
  that doesn't count). 

* The sysinfo and install mode let you establish a secure terminal 
  session to the "install-client" using ssh (once sshd is up and running). 
  This was just recently added due to the idea from Thomas Gebhardt. 

If you have questions or comments about NAIS, please feel free to mail us
at nais at informatik.uni-koeln.de. We welcome any suggestions or criticisms. 
If you find a mistake within the documentation or experience any problems
using NAIS, *please* let us know so we can correct it in the next version. 

Mattias Gärtner,
Lech Nieroda,
Jens Rühmkorf.

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