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maintaining servers with FAI



Hi,

cc:ed -team 'cause I'm sure I forgot someone...

in one way or another you will change important files on some machines 
tomorrow. (Or have today or...)

It would be really nice and helpfull, if (at least some of) you:

Read http://layer-acht.org/fai/fai-at-debconf5/ (its very short) and then get 
the fai-deb from http://layer-acht.org/fai-files, install it and run
sudo fai -N softupdates

Then have a look at /var/log/fai/localhost/last-softupdate/* and first at 
$path/error.log - it should be around 6 easy fixable lines. This has allready 
been done successfully on the comas server... and not by me :-))

Then join the alioth-project fai-config-dir, so i can give you write access 
(see below how to "control damage" which could be done) and check it out to 
your local disc as described on my webpage. Have a look 
at ./debconf5/class/55-debconf5-classes (that why I cared about dns so 
much...) and ./debconf5/scripts/, ./debconf5/packages/ and ./debconf5/files/. 

I've allready set up svn commit mails, to be able to track updates to the fai 
config dir more easily. 

(*)

So FAI is basically ready, two important "minor" things for our kind of usage 
are missing in the above .deb (btw which only has a few modifications from 
the package in sarge): we'll want to be able to install different hosts with 
different tags of the config dir and we'll also want to be able to test 
modifications locally easily before commiting them to subversion.

The first is very easy as you might guess and I've prepared (and tested) the 
second, but not packaged yet. But this wont take much time.


(*) Here is a paragraph missing. Maybe I should/have_to explain to you shortly 
how to actually use fai. (Follow the instructions in this mail first, please. 
Thanks.)

At the moment I dont know how this will happen and how many really will be 
working with fai (for various reasons). For those who'll use it, I would 
suggest partly via mail (reply and ask questions or by reading commit logs 
(its enough if very few people do this)), irc and, last and definitly not 
last, by RL interaction. Interaction and -communication is the key anyway :-)


regards & now i'll be sleeping for real :-) 
	Holger

P.S.: the overview of machines at the end of that webpage of mine is 
out-of-date and wrong. Should be fixed ASAP :)

P.P.S: dns+dhcp is also allready prepared for FAI. If we use tags (not like 
HEAD :) for the fai config dir and run sarge/stable (plus backports in a 
locally controlled repository) we could even put "fai -N softupdates" in 
crontab. But running this on demand is also fain^wfine.

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