Intermediate documentation (was: FAIBASE/10-misc and hostname)

[Toomas Tamm]

On Mon, 2013-03-11 at 11:17 +0100, Dirk Geschke wrote:

> Sounds good, there seems to be a big problem with FAI: The first steps 
> are very cumbersome and I remember the documentation was not very helpful. 
> Afterwards, when I got it up and running, I found nearly all in the 
> documentation...
> 
> It looks like there is a gap between "beginners" and "advanced users".
> But I can't say, where it is nor how to fill it...

I completely agree with the need for "intermediate" documentation. I
still remember my frustration about not getting FAI to work in the
beginning.

In my view, the problem is that the users of FAI are almost never real
beginners. A beginner would use normal Debian installation tools to
install Debian. The target audience for FAI has usually significant
system management experience and wants (or needs) to do things in
specific (possibly non-standard) ways - either out of habit or due to
the task at hand.

There may be already existing infrastructure in place (DHCP servers, IP
numbering and hostname assignment rules, security ramifications) which
do not allow a one-to-one following of the examples.

Perhaps we need a list of "what if" scenarios with example solutions:
- what if there already is a DHCP server present
- what if I have no control over that DHCP server
- what if I need to use an existing host for NFSROOT, but can not
  install extra packages on it
- what if I need to install a diskless client
- what if I install onto exotic hardware not supported by the default
  kernel
- how to manage the config space in a revision control system
etc, etc

I might contribute some of these, if we agree on a structure where to
place these. I also guess that the solutions to some of these already
exist, but may need to be better structured / presented.

Toomas Tamm