A few teething troubles

[Andrew Stribblehill]

I've been trying to get FAI to install a sample PC and ran into
the following problems:

--------- Problem 0 ----------
FAI's rcS script muttered about a missing T171 variable.

I think this might be due to my entering all 7 NTP servers into
the bootptab file. Certainly, when I reduced this to 3, the
problem went.

Is there a better way to sort this out?

--------- Problem 1 ----------
Error: /tmp/disk_var.sh not found.

This seemed to be fixed when the minumum size of /usr in
/usr/local/share/fai/disk_config was changed from 700M to 400M.
This, I presume, is because I had a 1275M hard drive, which was
just too small for the 4GB class, despite fitting the requirements
in class/S07disk.pl.


--------- Problem 2 ----------
When I ran make-fai-nfsroot, I got a root filesystem that Debian
told me was unconfigured.

Is this because package sysvinit was upgraded in the process? If
so, should this part of update-nfsroot function happen after
upgrade?

--------- Problem 3 ----------
Doing the installation, apt-get waited for user input when told to
upgrade.

This is, I presume, because it hasn't got a sensible apt.conf file
for this occasion. I forced it by changing prepare_apt's 'apt-get
upgrade' to 'apt-get upgrade -y'. Again, is there a better way?

Also, because all output from apt was directed to a file, I didn't
see the problem, and left the machine at the prompt: 'installing
packages can take a while'. To fix this, I changed the line:
   prepare_apt >> /tmp/prepare-apt.log 2>&1
 to
   prepare_apt |tee -a /tmp/prepare-apt.log 2>&1

so I could see what was happening.



Sorry these sounds like petty complaints -- I'm _extremely_
impressed by the potential of this package, and would love to help
in any way I can.

Thanks,

Andrew Stribblehill
Systems Programmer, IT Service, University of Durham, England.