Compaq Alphaservers and FAI

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 10:37:43 -0400, David Bremner <bremner at unb.ca> said:

    > I am thinking about debianizing a cluster of 16 alphaservers
    > (DS10s), so naturally I am interested in FAI.  I saw the
    > sparc-linux tutorial, which made me think it might be possible.
    > Can anyone report any experience?

    > I can TFTP boot; I installed woody on a compute node via the net
    > no problem.
Looks very good. You solve one of the main problems.
Sure, it should be possible. Now, let's check following things:

- will you use bootp or dhcp to supply FAI_FLAGS, FAI_ACTION and
  FAI_LOCALTION?
- Which packages that are included in make-fai-nfsroot and the
  package_config examples are not available on alpha architecture?
- Which packages should be added?
- is sfdisk available on alpha? If not, you can't use setup_harddisk
  to partition your harddisk. Is alpha using msdos partition tables?
  There was a posting about using a hook and parted for partitioning
  hard disk on PPC architecture.
- which boot loader can be used? Currently only lilo and grub is
  supported and tested with i386

I think this are the main topic. Feel free to aks us if you have more
problems. And I like to see a final posting (like a Alpha and FAI
HOWTO) on this list or maybe a patch to add a new chapter to the FAI
guide.

BTW, what about the other projects using FAI for PPC and IA64? Any
news, guys?
-- 
regards Thomas