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Experience with Fully Automatic Installation?

Hi,

We're currently running a 32-node dual PIII processor
cluster with Myrinet interconnect under RedHat 6.0.
We're considering moving it over to Debian 2.2 (better
package handling, more stable distribution).  I ran
across this site which describes a set of scripts, etc
for installing and maintaining a Debian Beowulf cluster:

FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) Home Page
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/

Does anyone have any experience with this software (good,
bad, or indifferent)?

Thanks,

-Rod Price
303-360-4428
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http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
 
Title: FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) Home Page

FAI (Fully Automatic Installation)

This is the home page of FAI, the fully automatic installation for Linux or Solaris. These are two different projects. One is FAI for Linux using a Debian GNU/Linux distribution, the other is FAI for Solaris. These projects share only the same basic concept how to do a fully automatic installation. The scripts and programs used are quite different.

FAI for Linux

FAI is a non interactive system to install a Debian Linux operating system on a PC cluster. You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on the whole cluster, without any interaction necessary. Thus it's a scalable method for installing and updating a cluster with little effort involved. FAI uses the Debian distribution and a collection of shell- and Perl-scripts for the installation process. Changes to the configuration files of the operating system are made by cfengine. Using fai, a fully automatic installation of a Linux cluster which consists of 16 dual Pentium PC's was performed.

Here are some links to usefull information for tools and programs used by fai. Before you try to adjust fai to other Debian versions or other Linux distributions, please announce this to the mailling list. Maybe somebody's working on the same things.

NEWS: fai 1.2.0beta is available. Fai is now available as a Debian package. Thus the directory layout has changed since version 1.0.1. There are also new features. It's not an official Debian package yet, but I hope it will be soon.

FAI for Solaris

We are doing a fully automatic installation of Solaris on SUN hardware with Jumpstart (read the Solaris Advanced Installation Guide at docs.sun.com) and the scripts of Casper Dik. These scripts work for the installation of Solaris on SUN SPARC hardware and for Solaris x86 on computers with Intel processors.
...back to Home Page
july-11-2000

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