"clone" an example client?

[Frank Lienhard]

On 12/08/2011 03:07 AM, Brian Kroth wrote:
> Henning Sprang <henning.sprang at gmail.com> 2011-12-07 23:54:
>> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Frank Lienhard <frank at saliko.de> wrote:
>>> I have an i386 client, which I installed manually and I'm now 
>>> wondering how
>>> to setup future clients "identical" to that with FAI
>>>
>>> at least to have the package selection transfered to the FAI config 
>>> would
>>> save a lot of work, I think
>>
>> you could use the output of dpkg -l
>> but you should probably remove stuff staring with lib
>> and you could install a basic system and remove everything that's in
>> there already from the list.
>>
>> Also, there are logs from apt/aptitude that could show you which
>> packages you installed manually.
>>
>> You could do something similar by diffing the /etc of the manuall
>> system with the system after installing all packages to identify
>> manually changed configs.
>> If you know that you will install the system with fai after (e.g. in
>> an early development stage) fiddling with it manully, you could use
>> git ot etckeeper to see which changes you really made to /etc - or
>> just saving all files you edit with %-orig before changing them.
>>
>> Henning
>
> If the client is recent, aptitude will tell you what's been manually 
> requested and installed versus what's been installed as a dependency 
> (eg: libs that were referred to previously).
>
> Here's what I usually use, though I know there's some other commands 
> out there to do something similar in a more elegant way:
>
> # aptitude search . | grep ^i | grep -v '^i A' | awk '{ print $2 }'
>
> Brian
OK, I think I still miss something essential.
I understand that the above aptitude line gives me all packages which 
have to be installed and all others will get installed via dependencies.
But I'm supposed to put this in the /etc/fai/NFSROOT file?
I guess not, because I think I don't have to have them all in the 
nfsroot dir.
So can someone point me the right direction to the docu/config files 
(I'm somewhat lost in the FAI docu..)

Thanks