Building a multi-OS install ISO image?

[Stefan Möding]

Hi!

I have a FAI server running and can successfully install VMware virtual
machines with different operating systems and releases.  Now I'm looking
into preparing a CD to do the same with real hardware.

We have a network using many different VLANs and I can use the VMware API
to create a VM in the FAI VLAN for doing the install and move it to the
correct VLAN later.  This is not feasible for a hardware system and
therefore I need to do the installation without any working network
connection.

I used fai-mirror and fai-cd to create one image for Debian-10 and one
image for Ubuntu-18.04.  Now I'm looking into two aspects to make it
easier and maybe have someone less experienced do the installation:

Idea 1: have only one CD image and use profiles to select the OS to
install

Is this doable?  It seems that fai-mirror can only create a mirror for one
OS.  Debian and Ubuntu have multiple packages using the same name and
trying to put both operating systems into the same mirror directory does
not seem to work.

How about a non-Debian mirror?  Is there any documentation about creating
a CentOS mirror usable with fai-cd?

Idea 2: use one CD image for one OS but use profiles to configure options

I want to use profiles to decide if the machine should have the Puppet
agent and configuration added during installation.  I already have this
working for VMs where I can add the class to the kernel commandline for
a specific node.  I would like to avoid an additional CD image for this
and it looks that profiles could be the way to ask the user about this.

It seems that all profiles in the config space are included in the image.
Is there an easy way to include one set of profiles for a Debian CD and
another set of profiles for an Ubuntu CD?

I'm thinking about creating a temporary copy of the config space and
include that after removing the unneeded profiles.  I am missing something
here?

-- 
Stefan