FAI going to the cloud

[Derek Poon]

On Sep 27, 2016, at 8:24 PM, Thomas Lange <lange at informatik.uni-koeln.de> wrote:
> 
> 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.

As long as you've thought it through, that's fine.


> Which flexibility is missing in the wrapper? All you can do in FAI,
> can also be done when calling fai-diskimage.

At the moment, one example I can think of is creating more than one disk image at once, such as an OS image and a data image.


> Do you think .raw is the right extension or is .img better? Which other
> formats should be supported?

Other common formats include VDI, VMDK, and VHD.[1]  Personally, I would make it convert to any recognized extension; any other extension on the user-supplied image name (whether .raw, .img, or .whatever) would case the result not to be converted.

I can also imagine that some users might want the installation process to produce the result packaged in an OVA, in which case the output would be an entire virtual machine rather than just a disk image.  In my opinion, a hook for such local requirements would be preferable to a wrapper around a wrapper around fai.

[1]: https://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/03/ovf-virtual-machine/