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

[Alexander Thomas]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Thomas Lange
<lange at informatik.uni-koeln.de> wrote:
>>>>>> 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.

Correct, I skipped that step during that first test.


>     > 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.

I actually was using that approach already, but I must have messed up
something that caused fai-mirror to break.


> 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

OK, this works indeed. The only strange thing that's left, is that I
have a Debian logo in the Xenial consoles. Otherwise it looks like a
legit Xenial install. We'll probably remove or replace that logo
anyway in a hook script.

Some more details to make it work:
- Remove updatebase.UBUNTU to ensure the files are installed from the
local mirror
- fai-mirror complains about one unknown package: linux-image-amd64,
this can be fixed by omitting this package in package_config/DEBIAN


Thanks for the help,

-- 
Alexander Thomas