Fai server can be a different architecture from clients?

[wtautz]

Henning Sprang wrote:
> 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
Ok. So inorder to create an nfsroot of arch type X one needs to be
on a machine of arch type X?

Consider the following scenario:

1. I have an FAI server on arch X with various nfsroots of arch types
Y_1, Y_2 (these could be mounted via nfs from hosts of type Y_1, Y_2...
where these Nfsroot would have been created by installing fai-server
and running fai-setup).
2. I have clients that are of type Y_1, Y_2... and I want to use a single
FAI server to install them. It would be good if a menu would come up
on the client that would allow me to choose the correct FAI kernel image for
that arch. I think this should be feasible. In fact, we have an image
server that already has this ability. Anyone doing this?

-wt