Not using fai-chboot (was: FAI failure behavior)

[Toomas Tamm]

On Tue, 2014-06-03 at 01:46 +0200, Holger Parplies wrote:

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

I am one who does not, here are my reasons:

* It introduces additional complexity into the boot process, requiring
access to the boot server (or network in general) for the host to boot.
While lack of such access normally would cause the BIOS to fall though
to the next method (local disk), this also introduces additional delay.

* I prefer to maintain my tftp configuration independently of
fai-chboot. I have set up a set on symlinks and a script to manipulate
them, which makes the whole tftp setup much more transparent and
human-readable. This also makes it possible to boot non-FAI targets such
as gparted or memtest86 or diskless clients.

I set my hosts usually up with the hard disk as the first boot target,
and PXE second. When the disk is initially empty, the disk is skipped
and the system boots into FAI. Once the disk has been written onto, when
a reinstall is needed, I override the default manually with appropriate
keypress (many BIOSes these days have a dedicated "Network boot" key;
the rest need manual boot device selection).

PS If there is sufficient interest, I may describe my TFTP setup in a
separate post. Please ask if you are curious.

Regards,

Toomas