Using FAI to install a "root Server"

[Torsten Schlabach]

Dear List!

I am currently doing some experiments with FAI to use it to install a server which is rented in a data centre somewhere on the Internet, aka root Server. This mean in practice:

- I have no access to the hardware, i cannot insert any CDs or the like.
- I have no power over any DHCP infrastructure in the network the box is in.

So here is what I did / tried:

1. I have created a FAI server which can be reached via the Internet.
2. I have created a boot floppy image, mounted it with -o loop and looked at the grub config.

There I found a kernel image called

vmlinuz-2.6.20-fai-kernels

So I have set up Lilo on the server to boot into this kernel and used the append variable to add the kernel parameters for IP config and mounting the NFS root filesystem.

This seems to have worked, because if I reboot the server (I can do that through a remote control web interface) I can see that it mounts the /srv/fai/nfsroot from my FAI server.

>From that I conclude that I boot the right kernel and that the kernel parameters for root=/dev/nfs and the corresponding IP configuration seem to have worked.

But IIUC I should - in a next step - see that the install client mounts the /srv/fai/config directory, but it does not even attempt to and I wonder why.

Any ideas? I am not sure that should happen next after the FAI kernel has booted and mounted the root filesystem. Is there anything in my /srv/fai/nfsroot which I should check?

There is no initrd involved, is there?

Do I have any means to write debug information anywhere over the network? faimond does not display anything.

Regards,
Torsten