FAI for PowerPC and Re: Live without NFS?

[Holger Levsen]

Hello,

> Hello, I'd like to use FAI for automatic installation of Debian on Motorola
> PowerPCs (industry rack, no console - perfect job for FAI ;-).
> Unfortuneately my install server has to be a Windows 2000 machine (I know
> that's a design bug - but its not my fault and I cannot change it).
>
> As far as I understood the FAI documentation (and the list archive),
> there's no way to live without NFS? I don't have an NFS server on the
> Windows host and I'd like to avoid buying one ...
>
> Or would it be possible to use tftp (or even ftp) instead?

1st of all, as you allready have realized it now, the windows server is a 
design bug, so I would advise you to resolv that bug as soon as possible, 
since it's a design bug ;-)

But, anyway, there are free nfs servers for windows, G**gle just told me. 
There is also a cygwin port of the standard unix nfs server.

But again, you will also need a Linux server to build the nfsroot.  This 
absolutly *should* be a Debian/GNU Linux PowerPC system - it will save you a 
lot of trouble when building the nfsroot. 

With fai 2.3.1 (the one in Woody) I succeeded building the nfsroot on PowerPC. 
I had to patch make-fai-nfsroot a little but not too bad. And I since I 
thought task task_partition() would use fdisk (which isn't available on ppc, 
but it uses sfdisk which is), I decided not to give it a try and used a hook 
instead (and so I did the partitioning manually).

Right now I'm giving FAI 2.5.1 a try on ppc. The results will be published 
here ;-)


> Thank you for your hints
> Peter

kind regards,
	Holger