FW: FAI success stories

[Bruce Edge]

> I always look for some success stories of people using FAI. Maybe you
> can tell me a little bit more of the use of FAI in this company.

You asked....

I thought it would relieve me from being involved in everyone's desktop debian installations. So I originally set it up just for that.
Then we moved our target platform OS to debian as well.
Now we use it for installing both development workstations and out target platforms.
It's setup with a few menus on the front end so you can choose workstation or target
For workstations you can then choose the machine class, desktop, build server, etc...
For targets you can choose the hardware type you're installing on (for what can't be autodected), and the release you want installed on it.
It makes it very simple to keep target boxes for QA and developers up to date. A complete target install takes only about 10 minutes.

It is a mission critical piece of software for us now. We have 3 FAI servers, one for my testing and fiddling, the "official" one which has been moved to a fault tolerant RAID box because everyone relies on is so much, and a remote official copy which is mirrored with rsync so our remote office can do the same as us.

We cannot live without it at this point. Everything from development, to QA to manufacturing uses it. mfg creates the official master disk images using FAI. 

There, I said it, we're hooked.

While I'm at it, here's my FAI wish list:

1 - Generate bootable CDs which provide the same funtionality as installing from FAI. Basically install the FAI software and a partial debian mirror on a bootable CD.

2 - Rather than install on a target box, have the FAI server be able to generate the install image in a directory so that target machines can NFS boot from it.

Great stuff, thanks.

-Bruce.

PS, I'll post some of my hooks and scripts as soon as I have some time to get them organized.