upgrade FAI 2.10.2 to FAI 3

[Henning Sprang]

Hi Rudy,

There are quite some options and decsions you can make here - a lot
depends on what you really want and need:

On 4/10/07, Rudy Gevaert <Rudy.Gevaert at ugent.be> wrote:
> So I want to upgrade my FAI to version 3.  That first of all means that
> I will have to run etch.

Why? I didn't try that much myself, but as far as I know, there are
some people running FAI 3 on sarge happily.
if you are eager to run the newest Debian version on your install
server, that's another thing - but don't blame the FAI upgrade then :)

> But I would like to provide some support for my sarge installed
> machines.  E.g. I should be able to reinstall my sarge installed servers
> (i386 and amd64bit).  And then begin installing etch machines :)
>
> I see not to much problems, except:
> - my configspace depending a bit on sarge

That is one point for keeping with sarge until you "ported" your
configspace to work with an sarge nfsroot. You can install etch
clients from a sarge server, even running fai 2.x.

> - serving/creating the sarge nfsroot

Creating the nfsroot:
There are 2 main things - the FAI config need to know that it should
build a sarge nfsroot - that is configured with something like
DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTIONS somewhere in /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf, I
think.

The other is, I am not sure if etch debootstrap is still able to build
a sarge chroot - I saw it sometimes that there are scripts for other
older versions in newer debootstrap versions, but they don't do what
you expect. Most often, I'd need to install the debootstrap version
from the exact version I'd wanted to build a chroot for. But, try it
and let us know :)
If you don't want to install sarge debootstrap, there's a way to
extract the scripts and run them from somewhere else - sounds ugly,
but that way you don't need to fiddle with installing different
debootstrap versions. I can build chroots for sarge, ubuntu, and etch
on one machine without having to dpkg different debootstrap versions
each time.

Serving the nfsroot:
If you only have one nfsroot,  it'll be just served as before. If you
have multiple, it depends on how you boot your machines.
I communicate the nfsroot location via dhcp, so if I had multiple
nfsroots (which I had some time ago until I saw it's better not to
have them), I'd use different dhcp entries for the machines with
different values for the nfsroot (don't know the parameter now, and
don't have the system at hand, can tell you later).

Last but not least, as said in another thread just yesterday, I'd not
recommend to create an extra nfsroot for each distribution/version -
because your configspace might be depending on a specific version.
Instead, use the features for multiple base images to install
different versions from one nfsroot as long as you can.

Henning