Installing mixed potato / woody

[Arto Teras]

Hi, 

We have been running FAI on a test cluster for a few months. Up to now I've
been using potato. 

For testing it would be nice to be able to have both potato and woody nodes
at the same time, so that some boxes would be running potato and some woody.
The idea is that the installation set could be easily selected by just
choosing class "STABLE" or "TESTING" based on the ip address in the FAI
config/class subdirectory.

What is the best way to do this with FAI? At least the sources.list file for
apt needs to be selected based on the class, and apparently the woody nodes
should use the debootstrap method and the potato nodes should start with the
base2_2.tgz? Are there other differences?

At this point this is not a critical feature (our cluster is not really a
production system and I can go directly to woody) but in the future we'll
probably want to keep some boxes stable and do bleeding-edge stuff on
others. 

BTW, some of our users wanted to test their software on a fixed Red Hat
setup. I found it very easy to adapt FAI to the traditional ugly "tar.gz
installation method" for a couple of boxes by overriding the task extrbase
and extracting a pre-made tarball in the script instead. Then skip some
debian-specific tasks (skiptask extrbase mirror updatebase instsoft finish
chboot) and still use FAI for post-configuration stuff. Of course the right
way would be to run a proper rpm installer script, but this quick'n'dirty
fix is fine for our current needs. Could do the same for other operating
systems too of course. 

AJT

-- 
Arto Teräs --- See http://www.iki.fi/ajt/ for contact info