Using FAI to install a "root Server"

[Torsten Schlabach]

Holger,

I had been thinking a bit about your suggestion over the weekend. In my 
special situation (rented dedicated server, aka "root Server") it would 
of course cover 3/4 of the potential benefits to "just" use the so 
called "soft update" for configuring and installing software 
automatically after a manual installation of the root system.

But I would like to have that last 1/4 as well.

Typically, "manual installation" in case of a root Server means that you 
will get any kind of image that the company you rent the server from has 
created. That image might already contain stuff you don't want (I once 
had a complete graphical desktop in such an image; quite useful on a 
headless server) and AFAIU this won't get de-installed by FAI.

Another subject is disk partitioning. With the image, I either get all 
of the disk in one partition (and I might want to have separate system 
and user data partitions) or vice versa. So I need to reformat.

Also some server rental companies are slow to support new kernel version 
in their images and we for sure want Xen kernels with some of our machines.

So adding this up, I feel that it's worth solving this properly and come 
up with a mechanism to make sure that a root server gets installed with 
the disk paritions and the kernel I want and *only* the software I want.

Not to mention desaster recovery. A desaster will always happen when you 
will not be there yourself and don't have the most experienced personell 
on duty. So having kind of a one-button restore mechanism (after someone 
replaced a faulty harddisk for example) can be quite useful as well.

Of course, this is an individual decision.

Regards,
Torsten

Holger Levsen schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> On Friday 11 May 2007 18:17, Thomas Lange wrote:
> 
>>    > system and then use FAI softupdates to configure the machine and keep
>>    > it up to date.
>>Holger, this is the FAI mailing list. We do not want to install
>>manually :-)
> 
> 
> Thomas, I seriously think you're wasting FAIs potential if you insist on 
> doing "fully automatic installations only"  with FAI.
> 
> To me FAI means "Fine automated infrastructure".
> 
> And sometimes doing manually installations and just doing the rest (which is 
> usually more than 95% of the work) with FAI is much more sensible than 
> insisting on fully automatic installations.
> 
> 
> regards,
> 	Holger