FAI comments

[Phillip Smith]

Greetings.

I am using FAI to setup a 16 node cluster, and wanted to comment on my
experience with it so far.  My other sysadmin colleagues on campus are
currently using NAIS (similar to FAI) and are looking to switch to FAI
as well.  It is a shame that the NAIS people decided to do the code
fork.. NAIS has some interesting things about it that could/should be
reincorporated into FAI.

Anyway, all of the cluster nodes have Intel 10/100 EtherExpress PXE
enabled cards, so I'm using pxelinux and it works well.  It took a bit of
effort to make DHCP 2.x pass all of the correct options for both PXE and
FAI, but now it too works well.

I'm now at the point where I'm customizing the fai scripts, etc.  After
having read the FAI technical report and v0.2 guide, I have a good
understanding of how the classes work... nice and flexible.

The main problems I've run into have been getting rsh/pam to cooperate
so that FAI can finish properly, and the issue with certain packages (like
nis) which aren't correctly debconf'ed.  I notice from the mailing list
that a number of people have had problems with rsh/pam ... I think it is
completely broken (anyone have it working with potato or
woody/testing ?).  I'm going to implement it with ssh, but it would be
nice if a better solution could be worked out (maybe the nodes could mount
a partition from the faiserver rw so that the logs could be written?)

The non-debconf'ed packages issue needs to be dealt with in a better
way.  I'll have to double check if this is in NAIS or if it's a
modification my colleagues made, but the way their NAIS setup is handling
it is via a script called install-problem-pkgs.sh.  Essentially, any
packages listed in a defined class under the packages-problem dir is
handled by the script.  The script will use apt-get -d (download only),
unpack the deb, delete the pre and postinst scripts, and then run dpkg
--configure.  This leaves it up to cfengine or other script to do whatever
configuration is necessary.  This can be integrated quite easily into
FAI.

Overall, I like FAI a lot.  Obviously everyone will have to do some amount
of customization, as there is no out-of-the-box solution that will work in
all situations.  FAI seems to provide enough baseline functionality to get
the job done, while still allowing plenty of room to tinker.

Thanks Thomas. :)

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Phillip Smith
Unix Systems Administrator
Geophysical Sciences Computing
NSIT, University of Chicago

Phone:  773-834-0695
E-mail: psmith at uchicago.edu
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