Possibly silly: FAI served from OS X?

[Matthew Braun]

I don't want to use FAI to install OS X, I just want use an OS X box to 
serve the appropriate files. I want to use it to install Debian onto 
i386 platforms. It's just that I can't use most of the install scripts 
since they expect a Debian (or "normal" Unix host) and OS X is kind of 
weird under the hood (what admin tools are available, where things go, 
etc).

This may seem like an odd idea ("why not just do it from a debian box 
like most sane beings"), but it's because I use my laptop everywhere 
and I'd like to avoid having a separate machine just for FAI.

--
Today, today, each day I have waited for you.
And now do they not say you are strewn with the shells of Ishi river?

On Sep 27, 2004, at 11:55 AM, Holger Levsen wrote:

> Hi,
>
> you try to create an nfsroot on your Mac - FAI (currently ?!) cannot 
> install
> Mac OS X - that's what you need the nfsroot for.
>
> From the subject I thought you wanted to have an OS C system to act as 
> FAI
> server - this is possible, because a FAI server only serves the 
> nfsroot and a
> configdir.
>
> You could use FAI to install (partition) images of OS X and use FAI's 
> class
> system to modify it afterwards. But this would be a totally new 
> frontier ;-)
> In _practice_ at least as far as I know ;-)
>
>
> regards,
>  Holger
>
> On Monday 27 September 2004 03:59, Matthew Braun wrote:
>> I spoke too soon; I hand-forced (just to be able to double-check what
>> was going to happen) the fai and fai-kernels packages just fine. The
>> place where I was finally stumped was running fai-setup. I bypassed 
>> the
>> the adduser portion (I don't really need the logging, and OS doesn't
>> have a native version of the adduser command) and went straight to the
>> "create_nfsroot" portion of fai-setup. At that point I had to give up
>> as I have no desire to hand-translate the script. If someone could
>> provide the actual command sequence run by the script, I might be able
>> to do basic replacements here and there. Also, I think it might be
>> easier if I just use http access rather than nfs (though I can do 
>> both,
>> although nfs configuration on OS X is a bit odd, using netinfo among
>> other things).
>>
>>
>> --
>> Today, today, each day I have waited for you.
>> And now do they not say you are strewn with the shells of Ishi river?
>>
>> On Sep 26, 2004, at 6:01 PM, Nicolas Triantafillou wrote:
>>> Hmm this one goes beyond my combined FAI/fink knowledge.
>>>
>>> Thought of other approaches such as virtual PC or debian for ppc ?
>>>
>>> Matthew Braun wrote:
>>>> I tried using apt-get to install the necessary packages but because
>>>> the architecture is not i386, things go haywire. Since I want to
>>>> serve the nfsroot off my OS X box, and I've set up a mirror of 
>>>> Woody,
>>>> my main concern is how to manually configure the layout since I 
>>>> can't
>>>> rely on apt/dpkg to do it for me:
>>>> root at Obsidian:Clean me up!# dpkg --install fai-kernels_1.6_i386.deb
>>>> dpkg: error processing fai-kernels_1.6_i386.deb (--install):
>>>>  package architecture (i386) does not match system (darwin-powerpc)
>>>> Errors were encountered while processing:
>>>>  fai-kernels_1.6_i386.deb
>>>> Should I break the package apart and put things into place by hand 
>>>> or
>>>> should I just --force it?
>>>> --
>>>> Today, today, each day I have waited for you.
>>>> And now do they not say you are strewn with the shells of Ishi 
>>>> river?
>>>>
>>>> On Sep 23, 2004, at 3:54 AM, Nicolas Triantafillou wrote:
>>>>>> Can OS X use apt-get? If there's an apt repository for OS X the 
>>>>>> main
>>>>>> part may be already solved. The second questions is how to create 
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> minimal system, where we can chroot into. Debian is using
>>>>>> debootstrap
>>>>>> for this, but what is OS X using? For Suse, RH and fedora there's 
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> project called mach (http://thomas.apestaart.org/projects/mach/)
>>>>>> which
>>>>>> can build a chroot.
>>>>>> If we can not install OS X packages with apt-get, we have to 
>>>>>> adjust
>>>>>> the script install_packages.
>>>>>
>>>>> The fink project is used in OS X for installing a bunch of ported
>>>>> unix software on OS X. It uses apt-get and dpkg to do this, so this
>>>>> could possibly help solve some things. Getting that minimal system
>>>>> may be difficult though, as the unix backend of OSX is ported from
>>>>> FreeBSD.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://fink.sourceforge.net/ for more info.
>>>>>
>>>>> Nicolas.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Nicolas Triantafillou
>>>
>>> Computer Systems Officer
>>> Faculty of Informatics
>>> University of Wollongong
>>> Northfields Avenue,
>>> Wollongong, 2522
>>> Australia
>>>
>>> Phone:  +61 2 42215669
>