Fai server can be a different architecture from clients?

[Henning Sprang]

Hi,

On 11/21/06, wtautz <wtautz at cs.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> Hi, I presume it's possible to put fai-server package
> on a machine of certain arch and have clients be
> on a different arch. I'm am thinking of installing
> amd64 clients using intel server. Can I have different
> nfsroot partitions depending on the architecture?

I am not sure if you can select them automaticall at boot time. What
works in any case is
configuring the "right" nfsroot with dhcp.

But you need to build the nfsroot and base tgz on an amd64 machine.
There's also a fai-cd that contains these already - I am not sure if
it's up to date.

>  I notice the
> fai-kernels package seems to be architecture dependent
> but it seems to me that one should be able to install these
> kernels on an fai server irrespective of the server's architecture
> and make them available for different clients?

Hmm, yes, these are the kernels that are put into the nfsroot when
running make-fai-nfsroot. These aren't the problem, the problem is you
can't bootstrap an amd64 chroot (which is the nfsroot and the
base.tgz) on an intel machine, I think.

You really need to install at least one amd64 machine manually,
install fai and run make-fai-nfsroot.

Henning