fai installation

[Robert Markula]

Hello Rajesh,
I'm new to FAI as well, but that's what I've found out regarding your
problem (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!):

Rajesh pant wrote:
> Is it necessary to have an Internet connection to install a client?
FAI needs to fetch packages from a debian repository. Either this is the
official Repository server at ftp.debian.org (you'd need internet access
if you want to use this repository) or a local mirror (in which case you
need internet connection only for the first time for the local mirror to
sync; after that initial sync run you can disconnect the server from the
internet).

Should you choose to use a local mirror, you need to configure FAI at
three places:
(1) /etc/fai/fai.conf (FAI_DEBMIRROR)
(2) /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf (FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP)
(3) /etc/fai/apt/sources.list

at each of these files you need to change the default entry to point to
your local mirror.


> the installation took 556 sec. to install and all i can see is a black
> screen with the following message and then a prompt
>
>  GNU GRUB version 0.97 (639k lower / 1039168k upper memory)
>
> [ minimal BASH-like line editing is supported....etc........
>
> grub>
That's because FAI couldn't fetch the needed debian packages from the
internet (see above).
In my case it failed to install the kernel because of a missing
connection to the debian repository. Grub couldn't find the kernel, so
it defaults to the grub serial line.

Cheers,
Robert