Using fai-mirror and fai-cd for an offline Xenial installer

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:48:49 +0200, Alexander Thomas <alexander.thomas at esaturnus.com> said:

    > From what I find in previous messages, the
    > approach for making a Ubuntu installer is to make a Jessie NFSROOT
    > with a Xenial basefile.
Yes, that's right.

    > The workflow should be:
    > 1. Make or download a Xenial basefile
    > 2. fai-make-nfsroot
    > 3. fai-mirror
    > 4. fai-cd
Exact.

    > branch)” instead of “Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS”. Looks like a Frankenstein
    > install between Debian and Ubuntu.
That's because you skiped step 1.

    > I had my doubts from the start about making a fai-mirror with an
    > nfsroot from a different distribution than the one from the mirror
    > itself, but theoretically it seems possible. I tried to make it work
    > by first stripping all the unneeded parts from the config and only
    > keeping the bits needed for the nfsroot and Ubuntu. However,
    > fai-mirror keeps on failing because it seems to try to download jessie
    > packages from ubuntu APT sources, or vice versa.
try fai-mirror -b

    > Is it a sane idea anyway to try to make a stand-alone FAI CD that
    > installs Xenial from a jessie nfsroot?
Yes, this is be possible.

I did this using Ubuntu 16.04 from a machine running Debian
with a Debian nfsroot. But I've created a /etc/fai-ubuntu
directory. Not sure why this was needed. I guess fai-mirror looks into
/etc/fai/apt/sources.list before downloading the packages.

Here's some code for creating the CD

wget -P /srv/fai/config/basefiles http://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/XENIAL64.tar.xz
cp -a /etc/fai /etc/fai-ubuntu
edit /etc/fai-ubuntu/apt/sources.list, replace Debian entries with Ubuntu mirror
fai-mirror -b -C /etc/fai-ubuntu -m1 -cUBUNTU,DEMO,FAIBASE,DEBIAN,AMD64,GRUB_PC,XORG,DHCPC,XENIAL /tmp/mirror-ubuntu
fai-cd -g ~/grub.cfg.ubuntu-only -Jm /tmp/mirror-ubuntu faicd64-ubuntu-only.iso

-- 
regards Thomas