FAI question

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Fri, 19 Jun 2015 09:10:00 +0200, Paweł Paczkowski <iamitprogrammer at gmail.com> said:

    > Hello fai-project,
    > I wanted to install FAI system and I have a question to you. I haven't investigated it yet precisely but maybe you've expirienced with something like that. I want to install FAI-server on
    > non-debian machine. Would it work?
Here's a short Howto for this.

If you like to install FAI on a non-deb system (here we assume a rpm
system) you cannot install the fai packages.

First, read the FAI guide, and have a look at one of my talks I gave
about FAI. http://fai-project.org/talks/
It important that you know how to set up and configure NFS, TFTP and
DHCP on your server.

We assume your FAI server is called faiserver and has IP 192.168.33.250.


On a non-Debian machine, you cannot use the FAI commands
fai-make-nfsroot and fai-setup. Instead you have to unpack a
precreated nfsroot and make entries to your /etc/exports manually.

Get a generic NFSROOT using FAI 4.3.3 from
http://fai-project.org/download/misc/nfsroot-generic-fai-4.3.3.tar.xz

Extract it into /srv/fai/. You will get the subdirectory
/srv/fai/nfsroot.

Get http://fai-project.org/download/misc/config-space.tar.xz and
extract it in /srv/fai. You will get the default config space in
/srv/fai/config.

Add this line to /etc/exports:
/srv/fai        192.168.33.0/24(async,ro,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash)

And replace 192.168.33.0/24 with your own network.

At last you have to create a pxelinux.cfg for each install client you
like to install


Copy the kernel and initrd from the nfsroot to your tftp directory:
cp /srv/fai/nfsroot/boot/{vmlinux,initrd}* /srv/tftp/fai


Here's the file for client with IP 192.168.33.100. It's the file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux/cfg/C0A82164

default fai-generated

label fai-generated
kernel vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-amd64
append initrd=initrd.img-3.16.0-4-amd64 ip=dhcp  root=192.168.33.250:/srv/fai/nfsroot aufs  FAI_FLAGS=verbose,sshd,createvt FAI_CONFIG_SRC=nfs://faiserver/srv/fai/config FAI_ACTION=install rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.luks=0  vga=792

An examples four your dhcpd.conf is available at: https://github.com/faiproject/fai/blob/master/examples/etc/dhcpd.conf
You should add an entry for each of your install clients into
dhcpd.conf, so the client will get a known and fixed IP address.

Finaly boot your client from network card via PXE.
If you see the red ASCCI text on your client, most network things are
running well, and you only have to fill the config space with your
local needs.


P.S.: I someone like to put this howto into the FAI wiki and improve
it, I'm glad to give you a wiki account.
-- 
regards Thomas