FAI working like RIS?

[Ben Willcox]

Hello fellow FAI users,

As I am now working on my third project that uses FAI for installation 
(yes Thomas, I have filled out the questionnaire ;-)), I'm wondering 
what process the rest of you go through when creating a new workstation 
build (or whatever) - for me, I use FAI to bootstrap a very basic Debian 
install on a development target machine, then manually install and 
configure packages as required to get the machine ready to use.

When this is all done, the next task is to setup FAI and write scripts 
to do all the stuff I did manually, automatically. My problem though, is 
that being not an expert scripter, this process takes me a long time, 
and often many attempts to successfully build a machine automatically.
In fact, depending on how many target machines I have to build, and how 
complex the configuration, I sometimes wonder whether it would be 
quicker to install and configure them all by hand! (But still using FAI 
to bootstrap the initial OS from the network).

OK, so my fault for being stupid, but was wondering whether there is any 
way to eliminate this stage of manual scripting to get the machine 
configured by FAI - for example, with RIS on Windows, you use RIS to 
install the basic OS on a test machine, make your config changes and 
install packages, and then run a tool that checks the differences 
between the basic install and your customisations, and makes that new 
'image' available on the RIS server.

Is there anything available that will make FAI work like this?

Thanks,
Ben.