FAI failure behavior

[Holger Parplies]

Hi,

Peter Keller wrote on 2014-06-02 16:58:06 -0500 [Re: FAI failure behavior]:
> On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 10:39:16PM +0200, Holger Parplies wrote:
> > [...]
> > what a horrible idea!
> 
> That may be true, but the part that confuses me a lot about FAI was that
> when the installation is complete, the manual indicates that (somehow) the
> fai client will call back to the fai server and remove the pxelinux.cfg
> entry for the just installed client:

yes, that's task chboot. For it to work, root on the installed machine needs
to be able to 'ssh -l fai' to the FAI server, and the fai user on the FAI
server needs to be able to execute fai-chboot, i.e. have write permission to
/srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg (I think the default is for the fai user to *own*
this directory). If that's not the case, removing the boot configuration will
fail, and you'll end in the installation loop you describe.

Normally, fai-setup should set things up so that this will work.

If in doubt, start a faimond on your FAI server (before running an
installation), then you'll be able to see which tasks/hooks are executed and
which result they return.

> The manual (for FAI 3.0.6, but it is all that is public) states:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 6.10. Reboot the new installed system
> 
> At last the system is automatically rebooted if "reboot" was added to
> $FAI_FLAGS. Normally this should boot the new installed system from its
> second boot device, the local hard disk. To skip booting from network
> card, you can use the command fai-chboot(8) to enable localboot.
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> That is more than ambiguous.

True. You need to set up falling through to localboot first (i.e. 'fai-chboot
-o default') - once on the FAI server. *Then*, after each installation that
was not aborted before reaching the chboot task, FAI will reboot into the newly
installed system from the second boot device, i.e. the client will attempt to
network boot and will be directed to fall through to the next choice (usually
local hard disk, but depends on what you set your boot order to). If FAI_FLAGS
contains "reboot", that will happen automatically, otherwise you'll have
initiate the reboot manually.

I'm not completely sure why anyone would *not* want to 'fai-chboot -o default'.

> When the client finishes, the pxelinux.cfg file is never removed and
> the process starts all over from the beginning again.

See above; you probably have a misconfiguration of some sort (file permissions,
ssh setup ... are the logs saved to the FAI server?).

Regards,
Holger