Generic Installation classes?

[Haakon Humberset]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Erik Dykema wrote:
> Hi-
> 	I am quite new to FAI and am struggling to read / understand the
> documentation, apoligies if
> 	I would like to goot clients (to be installed) using PXE, and have
> successfully gotten them to boot and mount their NFS root directories
> (that "ip=255.255.255.255:autoconf" flag was tricky!).
> 	Question:
> 	Is there a class available to be downloaded that would mimic, as
> closely as possible, the barebones default installation achieved by
> using the regular debian installer, and not installing anything extra
> with tasksel or dpkg?
> 	This sort of a 'baseline' configuration would be really helpful to me
> as I attempt to learn exactly how to configure the classes myself.
>
> thanks,
> Erik

(About the ip= flag.. It is documented in linux kernel source in
Documentation/nfsroot.txt)

As far as I know (educated guess really), FAI doesn't share any source
code with the common installers that will be maintained by the installer
projects. Thus to get FAI to behave equally to whatever state an installer
is at now, you'll probably have to do a little configuring of your own.

What packages that are installed are controlled by the definitions in
package_config. If you want all nodes to have all packages installed by
your default installer, list whatever this is after a test install, and
add them to the DEFAULT entry there.

And write your own hooks and scripts. Consider the ones that are there as
examples you can learn from. The normal installers asks for configuration
option as you go along. Using FAI no options will be asked, so all options
will go by the defaults.. Thus you need to use scripts to configure the
packages after installation where this is necessary.

Hope this clarified a bit..

Haakon

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Haakon Humberset, Research Scientist, Interagon AS.       +47 982 03875
http://www.interagon.com                            humbe at interagon.com
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