Generic Installation classes?

[malk at sidehack.sat.gweep.net]

Here's what I did (I'm using sarge but should work with others)
and your mileage may vary:

Do an install w/ regular debian installer.  Use tasksel, but 
don't have it install anything extra which it seems is what
you want.  Go through the debconf pain so the system boots
up clean and login.

dpkg -l should show all packages installed and in the same state
i.e. something like:

||/ Name        Version     Description
+++-===========-===========-======================================
ii  adduser     3.51        Add and remove users and groups
ii  alien       8.41        install non-native packages with dpkg
ii  analog      5.32-8      analyzes logfiles from web servers

<snip>

Make sure all are "ii" nice and clean.

Now do this to build an FAI comaptible package list from what
is installed on that system:

cd /var/lib/dpkg
egrep '^Package:' status | awk '{print $2}' | sort > /tmp/CLASS

Edit /tmp/CLASS and add the following line to the top:

PACKAGES install

Then mv /tmp/CLASS to your FAI configs area package_config directory
and obviously rename CLASS to a class that is defined for your FAI
config.  For example for my generic setup I have the DEFAULT file
in package_config (which I leave unchanged) and then I have another
file called GENERIC that was made by the method above and my GENERIC
class machines install these packages in addition to the very basics
which are defined in DEFAULT.

When I need new packages on all my machines, I edit
package_config/GENERIC and add the packages needed -- then re-FAI
and they're all the same.  apt seems to do a good job at resolving
dependencies as necessary.

It would be nice to dependency prune the list down to the bare minimum
list, but I've found this works well to at least get a starter list
to work with that FAIs a machine that is equivalent to your by-hand
install w/ the debian installer.

This may not be the best approach, but works fine for my purposes.

-Eric

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