FAI Partition?

[Bruce Edge]

> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Paul Jimenez [mailto:pj at place.org]
> >> Seems like I saw something about a way to make any machine
> >> self-FAI-upgradable by putting a fai-floppy img as a small partitionon
> >> it... does this ring any bells for anyone?  I've got a really heterogenous
> >> set of machines that I need to install over, and they often need to be
> >> 'clean-slate'd, which right now I'm doing with a fai floppy. 
> >> I'd like to remove the need for the floppy if possible - but the don't 
> >> all run PXE or anything like that so I'm looking for this 
> >> partition-using scheme.
> >> Anyone got pointers?
> >>   --pj

> On Thursday, Dec 11, 2003, "Bruce Edge" writes:

> >We do the same thing with a shared grub config file that you 
> >can load off the LAN via TFTP.
> >This way you don't even need a FAI partition, just the grub 
> >boot entry.
> >
> >Your grub/menu.lst contains all your normal boot entries, 
> >when a FAI one that does a "bootp --with-configfile", this option pulls up 
> >another grub menu that contains all out FAI flavors.
> >
> >-Bruce

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Jimenez [mailto:pj at place.org]
> 
> This sounds interesting, could you go into a bit more detail?  
> what in menu.lst is set to 'bootp --with-configfile' ?  If 
> you're doing
> bootp then presumably the kernel on the box has to support 
> bootp, and also
> you have a tftp server set up and sharing... something (what?).  
> Thanks for your help!
> 
>   --pj

The grub entry I have to kick off FAI is:

title FAI
bootp --with-configfile

My dhcp.conf file contains the location of my shared menu.lst file:

option option-150 "(nd)/mnt/build1/fai/menu.lst";

This causes grub to grab the specified menu.lst type file


The shared menu.lst is something like:

title official            - official FAI    flavor 1
bootp
root (nd)
kernel /mnt/build1/fai-root/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20 ip=dhcp root=/dev/boot255 nfsroot=12.31.174.145:/export/fai/root FAI_LOCATION=build2:/export/fai/config  FAI_FLAGS=sshd,createvt,syslogd

title official-asic       - official FAI    flavor 2
bootp
root (nd)
kernel /mnt/build1/fai-root/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20 ip=dhcp root=/dev/boot255 nfsroot=12.31.174.145:/export/fai/root FAI_LOCATION=build2:/export/fai/config hda=slow hda=248,2,63  FAI_FLAGS=sshd,createvt,syslogd quiet

etc....

Of course, you could skip the whole second menu file too, and just put the above entries directly in your machines local menu.lst

-Bruce