FAI going to the cloud

Thomas Lange lange at informatik.uni-koeln.de
Wed Sep 28 05:24:56 CEST 2016


Hi Derek,

thanks a lot for all your ideas. fai-diskimage was written as a
wrapper script for several reasons. First I tried to implement it as a
new action like 'fai install' but I had some problems with that. The
wrapper script approach worked much better during the
development. Second, fai-diskimage has some other options, and will get
more diks image specific options in the future. Currently I do not see
much disadvantages in the wrapper script approach.

    > The second issue is flexibility.  The fai-diskimage script doesn't really do that much: it creates and mounts an image at the beginning, then possibly converts the resulting image to QCOW2 format afterwards.  If the fai command were tweaked to allow a size to be specified, then the image creation could be accomplished with a hook for the partition task (or perhaps a new diskimage task).
Which flexibility is missing in the wrapper? All you can do in FAI,
can also be done when calling fai-diskimage.

    > Whether the format conversion is needed could be inferred from whether the image filename ends in ".qcow2".  The conversion to QCOW2 could be done using a hook for faiend.
Yes, I also was thinking about detecting the image format on the name
suffix. Maybe I will change this and remove the -C option. Do you
think .raw is the right extension or is .img better? Which other
formats should be supported?

-- 
regards Thomas


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