recent install problems

[kris]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 23:15 +0200, Thomas Lange wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:40:16 -0700 (PDT), fai amd <faiamd64 at yahoo.com> said:
> 
>     > hi,
>     > i am trying to implement a fai process for amd 64 installs. i am not
>     > using the cd method. i am trying to do a pxeboot. 
> Why do you have problems? Use fai 2.10.1 and it will work out of the
> box. I just did it today. 

  I had the same similar experience with 2.10.1.  I tried upgrading fai 
as  the Dell 1425 servers won't boot with 2.6.8 from debian stable.  
I needed an updated kernel.   

  However, using Fai 2.10.1 presented a lot of problems.
My fai server was a debian stable running fai 2.8-sarge1.  I upgraded
fai to 2.10.1/unstable  and tried to install some new nodes.   
Inititial I received a message about trying to change a r/o filesystem
while opening the tty.

I noticed was that the install kernel under /boot/fai was not updated
using the new fai-setup, you need to  use the undocumented 
option fai-setup -k to force a new kernel install.
After this I tried re-installing some nodes and was blocked 
with the message   "unable to open console"  before 
the installation would start.   Not sure if this is a bug or not,
but it wouldn't work for me.  


After playing with 2.10 for 2 days, 
I eventually downgraded back to 2.8, 
modified /etc/apt/sources.list to include sid
mirrored sid by changing the debmirror script
modified /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/apt/apt.conf with 
 APT::Default-Release "stable"
and added node under /usr/local/share/fai/package_config 
with for the class KERNEL26 
  PACKAGES aptitude
  -t unstable
  linux-image-686-smp


This might be useful for others trying to run a stable 
system with a few packages from sid.



-- 
Kristian Kvilekval
kris at cs.ucsb.edu  http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~kris w:805-893-2526 h:504-9756