FAIBASE/10-misc and hostname

[George VerDuin]

I find this entire thread to be huge gentlemen.
It has everything to do with my nubie status with FAI plus end user 
community.


On 03/12/2013 06:36 AM, Thomas Lange wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:26:45 +0100, Dirk Geschke<dirk at lug-erding.de>  said:
>      > And of course: A collection of known problems and work-arounds would
>      > be nice. <<SNIP>>
> so feel free to improve this page or use the wiki.
I'd like to suggest MAYBE "more" is not "all better".  My reality is 
that it may take quite a few repeat executions to get the data perfectly 
correct.   As I pursue my personal objectives for FAI, I've been faced 
with questions like:

  * Is is safe to re-run fai-setup without re-installing from scratch? 
    Under what circumstances is it required to run fai-setup again?  How
    do I reconcile a statements in existing documentation "Run fai-setup
    only once" and "after ??? run fai-setup" (exact sources not remembered).
  * Why does fai-make-nfsroot need a specific choice in kernel version
    when version spec is not required during fai-setup?

These are trivial examples of procedural level questions where design 
governs the answer.  Answers are made difficult by the flexibility that 
FAI is famous for.  I find the "walkthrough" type document to be hugely 
valuable.  Yet I need to underscore the thoughts:

 1. Documentation as a whole needs consideration because new users need
    to know what advise to trust and what advise does not apply in the
    circumstance.  Perhaps a smaller current document collection with a
    large structured archive of superseded content is useful?
 2. FAI is part of a moving target so documents need rev level and date
    reference because all nubies are not using a single rev at one time.
 3. I'm glad that the words "up-to-date" docs was not the focus because
    covering all the variation is daunting.  It's more like a cluster of
    bees with FAI being the nest.  I'm blowing smoke? [I could not resist]

I know there is more to the list, but is seems worthwhile to start it.

I have seen the wiki to be useful as a framework for documentation 
because of the built-in concepts -- page content is subject to revision 
more than replacement (as in publishing a new users manual), and sample 
file attachments are easy.  It has a strong upside for community if it 
is structured for it.  The down side of wiki is the contributor who is 
off-base technically and the one who presents without concern for the 
experience level of the reader.  When a specific outcome is desired, 
user experience-to-date is the filter for documentation content.  And 
perhaps the worst downside is apathy.

FAI is in no way a plug-n-play application.  Sticking with that thought, 
the value of walk-through and a fool-proof set of example data is 
golden.  The more the merrier?  For new users who grew into Linux from 
other distros it is also tough to bring one environment (?Debian at 
squeeze rev?) to the table as the platform for FAI.  It's my experience 
that the Ubuntu 3.4.8ubuntu2 version is also not plug-n-play and I'm a 
little challenged by the quote "...nobody cares about Ubuntu...".  As an 
aside:  I also become curious when I find a history where mounting FAI 
on Fedora [something more like UNIX V5?] becomes hugely frustrating and 
abandon.  Therefore to wrap up all these experiences into one result -- 
many walk-though sample cases with many platforms contributed by many 
users as they join the main stream is perhaps the most helpful to the 
newbie success story.

AND it is not all about nubies.  Try moving from rev to rev when 
longevity and heterogeneous environments come into play.  Building a 
homogeneous cluster needs to be one test-case as well as building the 
next distro [say CentOs follows Debian?] or the next archetecture [say 
AMD64 follows PowerPC?].  Certainly there are combinations that don't 
work so where might I find the matrix that exhibits past successes?  My 
desire? -- platform distro, FAI server distro, FAI client distro, 
archetecture, [others], are all things my math-major friends call 
"independent variables", and I need to learn about those that work 
before I experiment with those that are new but better fit my objectives.

Sorry to have beaten examples to death.  It's more about user community 
experience than core project authorship.   It's also "learn by 
following"?  For my own part I will gladly contribute my success story 
soon as I find one.  I'm hoping FAI permits me to define all(?) hosts on 
the LAN for the long run instead of piecemeal project for each host and 
rev.  I also hope someday DHCP will permit "build in place" in favor of 
"build on subnet".  If it's any value I might be able to support an 
on-going test bed to run selected FAI variations against so that FAI 
might become closer to plug-n-play.

Thanks & cheers.
Geo
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