make-fai-nfsroot cross-platform?

[Steffen Grunewald]

Hi,

stupid problem again (probably I should try again tomorrow)..

I want to set up a FAI server on an Intel box, but to install to Alphas.
(I'm not talking about Alpha specific problems here, since they have
been solved months ago, but I had a working ALpha installation back
then; now I have to do everything from scratch.
See http://pandora.aei.mpg.de/~steffeng/fai/ for details.)

So I copied everything from /etc/fai to /etc/fai.alpha, and changed the
corresponding references to alpha mirror, new nfsroot path, etc.
I also set --arch alpha in make-fai-nfsroot.conf.

What I get from make-fai-nfsroot -c /etc/fai.alpha is

Creating FAI nfsroot can take a long time and will
need more than 230MB disk space in /data/debian/alfai/nfsroot.
/data/debian/alfai/nfsroot already exists. Removing
/data/debian/alfai/nfsroot
Creating nfsroot for sarge using debootstrap
chroot: cannot run command `mount': Exec format error
W: Failure trying to run: chroot /data/debian/alfai/nfsroot mount -t
proc proc /proc
umount: /data/debian/alfai/nfsroot/dev/pts: not found
umount: /data/debian/alfai/nfsroot/dev/shm: not found
umount: /data/debian/alfai/nfsroot/proc/bus/usb: not found
umount: /data/debian/alfai/nfsroot/proc: not mounted
chroot: cannot run command `apt-get': No such file or directory
chroot: cannot run command `dpkg-divert': Exec format error

OK, so the mount fails because it's using the one for the target
architecture instead of the arch I'm on (chroot ...)
Is there a simple way (besides running this on native alpha) to build
the nfsroot for the other architecture?
(It's kind of hen-and-egg problem since I don't have an Alpha with
Debian installed, that's why I tried to FAI...)

Cheers, Steffen

-- 
Steffen Grunewald * * * Merlin cluster admin (http://pandora.aei.mpg.de)
Albert-Einstein-Institut (MPI Gravitationsphysik, http://www.aei.mpg.de)
       Science Park Golm, Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
e-mail: steffen.grunewald(*)aei.mpg.de * +49-331-567-{fon:7233,fax:7298}