FAI MultiDistro

[Henning Sprang]

On 10/19/06, Thomas Lange <lange at informatik.uni-koeln.de> wrote:
> Ok. First Ubuntu.
> Reinhard is preparing FAI 3.X version for ubuntu edgy. We hope that
> this version will be included into edgy. You can see the sources here:
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/fai/people/siretart/

Attention! Take care not to mix up the task of "running a FAI Server
on Ubuntu" for which these mentioned packages are necessary, and the
task of "Installing an Ubuntu Server with FAI (more or less irrelevant
what the FAI server distribution is, it's mainly configspace tweaking"

So, Eddy, do you want to use a Debian or Ubuntu Server?

>
> For other distribution (rpm based) this is how it's done. Use FAI 3.1
> (will be released in a few days) or newer.

I successfully install Sarge, Etch, Ubuntu from a Sarge Server, with
FAI 2.10.5, with no more than some Configspace tweaking, and only
using the fai-make-base-tgz script which I have made available in the
fai-distributions package - but this just helps making the base.tgz
easily.

Fedora is on the way, I have a config where the install runs through
well enough, but for some reason the Xen domU I use for testing
doesn't boot (have no better error message here in the office). I have
no time currently to fix this, but it should be easy to do for
somebody who know Fedory better than me.

> You will still use a Debian
> (or Ubuntu) nfsroot that is easily create using the make-fai-nfsroot
> command. The difficult part is to create the base.tgz file for the
> other distributions.

Yeah, it's really hard to impossible to build a SuSE minmal chroot, at
least if you consider minmal less than 580MB, which is what I get with
yast dirinstall when chosing "minimal".
This should be easier to do for people who know the distribution well.

For Debian Etch and UBuntu my fai-distributions package as mentioned
in the wiki does help. But the version from Subversion should be used,
it contains the newest stuff, I can help with getting started with
this if there are any questions.


>Have a look at this url
>
> http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/FAI_multi-distribution
>
> It's a little bit outdated, because since FAI 3.0 there's a new
> subdirectory in the config space called basefiles/ where you should
> put your Centos or SLES or RHES base.tgz file.

That's not the main reason why it's outdatet. This is a nice
additional feature, but not strictly necessary. I also posted some
more comments on this to the devel list.

Mostly, the current state is, that I do it without patching FAI
itself, but only writing hooks, which makes it way easier for people
to test that - only changes in configspace, not an extra FAI package
is necessary. Anly fai-distributions, as said, which makes the things
described above.

For now, you can look at the configspace I uploaded with Xen examples:
http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/images/b/b1/Fai-configspace.tar.gz

It should work for real hardware when just defining the same classes,
but without "XENU"
Ask me, I can probably help to sort out most problems with that, and
when I am at home, I can upload a newer config than this one.

> The tool for installing packages (called
> install_packages) also nows how to install pacakges via rpm, urpm, yum
> and other methods. Have a look at the code.

Thomas, did you release a new version with the fix for the bug I
found, lwhich otherwiese makes installation of packages for non-debian
(or was it only yum?) packages impossible?

> BTW, I happy about any feedback how this works and maybe you like to
> update the wiki pages concerning this topic.

Me also. These wiki pages where written by me, so I'd like to be
involved in making them better. I invested quite some time in this,
and will continue to do so. Help and bugreports are necessary to get
it more smoothly. It's basically not hard to do if you know FAI, and
the distribution you want to install, but often it takes a lot of time
to fix stuff, test install, check logs, and again fix until you have
it working. At least when doing it with Xen you don't have to run from
one machine ot another...

One interesting topic that occurs, which I already realized when
setting up a quite simple demo config to show FAI installing multiple
distributions, is, that it gets hard to sort the different classes for
different distributions if you want to keep them in one configspace.
But that's a problem that should be discussed on the developers list,
when we have some input from users.

It would be cool if Stephen Hermann, who reported to have done it with
SuSE, could post some hints or at least the configspace (without
confidential stuff) he used for these things, so his experiences can
be added to a joint effort for makeing FAI a generic autoinstaller for
all main distributions.

Henning