debootstrapping multidistributions

[Fredrik Eriksson]

Mathieu Alorent wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Le samedi 13 novembre 2010 à 12:24 +0100, Michael Tautschnig a écrit :
>   
>>> I'm also thinking that possibly the basefiles.tgz could be built
>>> later, after more packages are installed, which would make an even
>>> faster FAI bootstrap install.  Maybe this will work only if the
>>> hardware is identical?
>>>
>>>       
>> I was hoping that someone else with more experience of using different
>> basefiles
>> would reply - seems like nobody has done so thus far. basefiles in a
>> way are
>> like disk images: It makes installation really fast, but you'll have
>> to update
>> them regularly and system-specific stuff cannot be incorporated. I'd
>> therefore
>> guess, yess, that a larger basefile makes bootstrapping faster. 
>>     
>
> I've done something like that. My basefiles are regenerated every two
> weeks. I've wrote a scratchy script that install CLASSES common packages
> in the basefile.
>
> This has really speeded up the install process! ~100sec per
> installation.
>   
I'm fairly new to FAI, started working with it two weeks ago, but I was
looking for a similar solution to our setup here since an old basefile
stalls the installation since FAI updates all the packages at the
installing client (where the basefile is unarchived).
I, however, found debian's pbuilder to be most convenient for this task.
You can either use a config that pbuilder defaults to or do something
along the lines of

     pbuilder --create --override-config --basetgz /path/to/base.tgz
--binary-arch <arch> --distribution <dist>

You can then, if you like, login to your base.tgz in a chrooted
environment with

     pbuilder --login --basetgz /path/to/base.tgz

and update the archive with

     pbuilder --update --basetgz /path/to/base.tgz

which is probably what we're gonna put in a cronjob at our server.

Pbuilder defaults to cdebootstrap, which seems to be just debootstrap
written in C, but can easily be configured otherwise in /etc/pbuilderrc
(have a look at /etc/pbuilder/pbuilderrc, the default /etc/pbuilderrc
overrides, if you choose to install it.


Regards
--
Fredrik Eriksson
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