FAI from disk partition

[David Hausheer]

Thomas Lange wrote:
> Your idea should be possible to implement but it needs some work to
> get it run. Maybe some ideas from fai-cd may help, since it also gets
> everything from a media without using the network.

I managed to run FAI from a local disk partition. However, sfdisk 
complained about the disk being mounted (although the mounted partition 
would be preserved). Thus I had to skip disk partitioning to make it work.

Finally, I solved the problem by running FAI from a (huge) ramdisk. 
Luckily, I have enough RAM (512 MB), so the whole nfsroot (250 MB) fits 
into it.

Here's how it works:

* Comment out FAI_LOCATION in /etc/fai/fai.conf, thus the configuration 
directory (/fai) will neither be mounted over nfs nor checked out from a 
cvs repository.

* Set FAI_BOOT to " " in /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf, thus 
make-fai-nfsroot will neither setup a dhcp nor a bootp environment

* Create the nfsroot directory with /usr/sbin/make-fai-nfsroot

* Copy the configuration directory to the nfsroot directory:

cp -a /usr/local/share/fai/* /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/fai

* Create a compressed ext2 image of the nfsroot, which will be used as 
initrd image. Note: cramfs won't work because of its filesize limitation 
(base.tgz is larger than 16MB).

dd if=/dev/zero of=initrd bs=1k count=250000

mkfs.ext2 -F -m0 -b 1024 initrd

mount -o loop initrd /mnt

cp -a /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/* /mnt

umount /mnt

gzip -v9 initrd

* Add the install kernel and the initrd image to the boot loader menu. 
(the ramdisk_size has to be large enough).

title FAI Install
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-fai ramdisk_size=250000 
ip=192.168.1.1::::demohost::off devfs=nomount FAI_ACTION=install 
root=/dev/ram0 FAI_FLAGS=verbose,sshd,syslogd,reboot
initrd /boot/initrd.gz

* Reboot and see the machine be installed standalone from ram :-)

David

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| Dipl. El.-Ing. ETH David Hausheer                                  |
| Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK), ETH Zurich     |
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