Fwd: fai-mirror and conflicting packages

[Henning Sprang]

to keep the thread on this list:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Larry Lindsey <gtg306b at prism.gatech.edu>
Date: Jun 6, 2006 6:27 PM
Subject: Re: fai-mirror and conflicting packages
To: Henning Sprang <henning_sprang at gmx.net>


Quoting Henning Sprang <henning_sprang at gmx.net>:

> On 6/2/06, Larry Lindsey <gtg306b at prism.gatech.edu> wrote:
> > [...]
> >I've already attempted
> > to place all of the packages in files/, but they take up > 10MB, causing
> FAI to
> > error-out early in the installation.
>
> I agree that fai-mirror should be able to get conflicting packages
> into the same mirror, also (which is probably not possible with the
> way it currently works)

It doesn't seem possible currently, however, I've found a workaround.  It seems
that fai-mirror does a ton of 'apt-get install's with the download-only flag
enabled, thus creating a hefty apt cache archive.  It then uses apt-move to
create a standard debian mirror directory structure.  I've inserted a line in
fai-mirror that copies the offending debian packages into the archive just
before the apt-move, and this seems to do the trick.

>
> Bu why and since when does FAI have a 10MB limit for the files directory?
> I used to have quite large files in there, I did get rid of it because
> it's just not good to have such things. But if somebody wants to, he
> should be able to stick GB's into files at will.

I should mention that I'm using fai-cd, and installing from a cdrom image.

If I understand correctly (and someone please correct me if I don't), the
install process mounts a tmpfs in a handful of directories.  In particular,
there is one in /fai, to which it copies the fai configuration tree.  The size
of the temp directory is limited by the amount of RAM in the system, so the 10MB
limit is probably an artifact of the machine that I'm installing on, which is in
fact a QEMU VM with only 64MB of RAM.  In any case, this limits the total size
of any files in fai/files to 10MB in my case, perhaps more for other machines.
Certainly, under this setup, you wouldn't ever be able to copy GB's directly,
however, it would be nice to have a /files directory in the CD image, from which
larger files could be copied into /tmp/target.

Larry



-- 
Henning Sprang -
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