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

[Peter Keller]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 12:10:09PM +0200, Thomas Neumann wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 June 2014 12:42:38 Toomas Tamm wrote:
> > 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'.

It turns out, that I can't use 'fai-chboot -o default' either. My BIOSes
hang with the default generated localboot 0 line. I have to use something
like this instead:

LABEL fai-generated 
    MENU LABEL Boot from first hard drive
    COM32 chain.c32
    APPEND hd0

If that ALWAYS works, and localboot 0 sometimes fails, maybe fai-chboot
should be changed to emit the above instead? I don't know the details
of portability though.

Also, I finally discovered my fundamental misunderstanding with FAI.

I didn't realize that when the client finishes installing it must either
A) call back to the faiserver with ssh, or some other means, to disable
the pxelinux.cfg file for that host, or B) ask fai-monitor -b -i to do
it for you when it notices the client has installed correctly. It really
should be more clear in the manual how FAI stops the infinite reboot
cycle when doing PXE booted install.

Mixed with the above workaround, it all finally worked along the
grain of FAI as opposed to against it.

I do have one question though, in the fai-monitor output I see this:

(none) check
(none) TASKBEGIN confdir
(none) TASKEND confdir 0
(none) TASKBEGIN setup
(none) TASKEND setup 0
....

The installing client machine has the ability to map the ip address dhcp
gave it back to a name and the fai server can too. I'm not entirely sure
why I see (none) there.

Thank you.

-pete