Ubuntu/Kubuntu and FAI

[Andreas Sindermann]

Hi,

using Henning Sprang's How-To as a guideline I managed to successfully
use the fai-setup/fai-make-nfsroot scripts for an Ubuntu installserver
on a based on a Sarge system. Thank you for providing it, that was
very helpful...

Also the client PC to be installed is successfully booting over the
network using the installserver. The install process is also
performing. However, there are two problems (probably related to each
other) which I currently cannot resolve, perhaps somebody on the list
has seen them before: 

a) For some reason the grub package is not installed and the
installation log files (esp. software.log) is not very informative
why. Effect is that the system is left in an unbootable state at the
grub> prompt.

b) When entering the needed information (kernel to be used etc) by
hand at this prompt the system is booting but for whatever reasons in
a very bad state. It seems that the /dev directory contains only very
few devices like /dev/sg and things like that. Especially /dev/sd* are
missing where the system has been installed on.

The reasons seem to lie in the base.tgz file created by the
fai-make-nfsroot script. When checking with 'tar tvzf base.tgz ./dev'
I can see that it contains only an empty /dev directory. On the other
hand the udev package is installed which should populate the /dev
directory.

Currently when booting the client PC with the nfsroot environment a
/dev with all needed devices is created (by udevd), but of course in
/tmp/target/dev no devices are available so all $ROOTCMD referring
this directory with /dev/sda (e.g. during grub-configuration) won't
find the appropiate devices.

Changing /etc/udev/udev.conf on the running nfsroot environment one
could change /dev to /tmp/target/dev but this cannot work as the udevd
process is already started in /etc/rcS/S04udev whereas the new root
partition on the harddisk to be installed is mounted later (of course)
as the corresponding devices need to be created first...

I hope this is not too confusing... :-)

Anyway, perhaps some people have already solved these problems and can
give me some adivce...

The logfile for the nfsroot-creation (where esp. the base.tgz archive
is created) is available:

http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fai-setup.log

And also the FAI-logfiles of the installation process itself are
available:

http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/software.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/FAI_CLASSES
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/additional.var
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/boot.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/cfengine.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/debconf.data
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/debconf.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/dhclient.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/disk_var.sh
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/dmesg.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/error.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fai.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fcopy.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/format.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fstab
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/partition.sda
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/shell.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/status.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/syslog.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/updatebase.log
http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/variables.sh


Thanks in advance!!
Andreas

-- 
Dr. Andreas Sindermann               fon: +49 (221) 470-4201
Institut fuer Theoretische Physik    fax: +49 (221) 470-5159
Universitaet zu Koeln
Zuelpicher Str. 77                   mailto:sinder at thp.Uni-Koeln.DE
D-50937 Koeln, Germany               http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder