Newbie-Questions: Install debian x86 from Solaris server

[Holger Levsen]

Hi Mark,

you're right: first you need to setup FAI on your i386 debian machine. Then 
use this machine as your FAI server for the other intel machine to learn more 
about FAI ;-)

After you learned enough ;) you can copy the nfsroot to your solaris machine 
and serve it to the intel clients from there...

It's much easier to make your first steps with FAI in an pure intel 
environment - if possible. 

The clients boot a kernel (from floppy, PXE, cdrom) and mount their root 
filesystem via NFS. It's handy to have a bootp or DHCP server to set the 
kernels boot parameters but not neccessary.

Installing additional software (which doesn't come from ftp.debian.org) can 
easily be automated with FAI_CONFIGDIR/scripts. But rather than compiling 
during installation you would want to compile some packages in advance and 
distribute that packages with FAI. More on that later, as this is easier to 
explain if you have some experience with FAI and a working installation.


regards,
	Holger

P.S: mail resent, as i've used a wrong from:-adress in my first post.