re: debian pxe dhcp netinstall (debconf enterprise fai etc.)
on ... <tstone@fachschaft.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote:
> First i tried "fai", but while i liked the concept of
> classes it was to much of a hassle and the number of scripts and
> dependencies was to much to understand in 4 hours (after which i gave up).
Did you try the simple example DEMO in FAI? Did you read chapter 4.8 "For the impatient user"?
I think one should get FAI work in 4 hours. But even if this time was
not enough, you could additionaly have spend the time you needed for
writing your installation scripts.
> name. It seemed to me that its development had cheased. But the death knell
> to fai was that it is currently not supporting "debconf". With the fallback or override
But you can extend fai (using hooks) to use debconf and debwrap
(debwrap was new to me - looks pretty nice) as you do in your
scripts. This should take only a few minutes to write such a hook.
> The whole process is "nearly working". Some things are missing such as
> that nis does not add +::: to the corresponding files and such packages
AFAIK, NIS does not need this line any more. Use the file nsswitch.conf instead.
> ... or debconf asking for manual input. Especially debconf with its
> initial dialog when first installed was annoying
Never seen this with FAI.
> I would like to have some feedback, especially on the topic of
> doing automatic updates with an cron job. I would also like to hear of
> some hints if there is an other tool which does the job (debix,
Some guys are using FAI not only for the initial installation, but
also for updates and daily maintenance. They are using FAI's new command fcopy
for this.
> script files. I think the whole automatic management thing (which is
> also the reason behind the whole "enterprise" discussion) has a lot of
> potential. Having the ability to reconfigure large clusters or
You're right. Automating system administration and configuration
management is a hot topic these days. Do you know these references?
Automating Unix and Linux Administration by Kirk Bauer
Bootstrapping an Infrastructure (1998) Steve Traugott, Joel Huddleston
Proceedings of the Twelth Systems Administration Conference (LISA XII) (USENIX Association: Berkeley, CA)
I think you should spend some more time to look a FAI. Most of the
things you need for an automatied installation are already implemented
and working for a lot of users for their clusters, labs and
desktops. Also two of the top500 cluster where build using FAI.
If you need debconf or debwrap support, it's eaesy to extend FAI to
support it. But then you have also the nice class system.
I also have problems, when people are trying to write some code from
scratch. Often they only spend a few weeks or month in coding, then
this project will fall asleep and all their good work is lost. Second,
do not underestimate the time you will need to get a lot of users that
will test your software. Without other users, your software will not
become better, because you can't find all the bugs yourself. To
summarize, I invite you to join the FAI mailling list and help improve
FAI, so it will also meet your needs.
--
best regards Thomas Lange (author of FAI)
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
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