FAI-installation server on different OS ?

[Thomas Neumann]

Hello Oskar

> We have a SUSE-based environment and I read in the documentation that it
> is possible to install other OSs as RHEL, Centos and Suse, and that is
> very good! However, my question is: Is it possible to run the fai-server
> on Suse, or is it bound to Debian ?

The server itself is not bound to any OS or even single machine, since
it's just a combination of dhcp, tftp and nfs. However you should setup a
Debian machine, install the fai-server package and let it build a
fai-nfsroot for you. After that you can copy the kernel-files from
/srv/tftp/... and the nfsroot from /srv/fai/nfsroot to any machine you
want to be the 'true' fai-server. Also executing "fai-chboot -I
<dummyhost>" once is a good idea so you have an example tftp
bootconfiguration file.

You also need to provide a config space in /srv/fai/config

[There's still a lot to do after that point though. I just described how
to prepare the base server.]

tschuess
thomas

P.S.: I have successfully installed SuSE with older versions of FAI and it
was a bumpy road. (Most trouble stemmed from properly configuring the boot
loader.) Some changes have been made in 3.4.8, but I haven't inspected
them, because I'm in the process of switching to 4.x.