Hi- I am somewhat familliar with Kickstart.The truly neat thing about it is that a system with PXE can be simply turned on and install itself completely, in a network setting where the right servers exist, like this:
1) Machine X powers on, PXE (on the network card) talks to DHCP and gets address of TFTP server.
2) PXE talks to tftp server and downloads PXE linux or other boot loader.3) Bootloader specifies kernel + append info + initrd file, just like syslinux. 4) Part of the appended info to the kernel gives information on the kickstart source. I.e. kickstart info is passed to the system like so
ks=nfs:nfs.servername.org:/kickstart/kickstart.file5) The installer runs, grabs the kickstart file from the specified place, and the answers to all the installation questions, lists of extra packages to install, etc., are in the kickstart.file .
There are extra features on the installer that would be nice (adding extra users, configuring LDAP & etc.) but there are post installation tools that do that already, such as cfengine. A simple automated install would be a great addition for DI. Someone had mentioned the possibility of getting the 'kickstart' file from HTTP. This would be another great idea, as an admin could use simple web scripts (PHP & etc) to dynamically generate the kickstart file when the machine came up, inserting into it the proper hostname, special packages wanting to be installed on that machine, etc. If anyone puts together a group to take a crack at this, i'd be happy to help as much as i am able...
Erik
Not having used either FAI or Kickstart (some kind of compatibility, or at least feature-equality to the latter would be _very_ good, as I do believe many users wanting automated installs will come from a RH world), I don't really know what they can do and how. For my part, I'd probably like something that could install the system automatically, add a few packages and add a few users, and that would be OK -- but would this be enough for all users? (If those are the goals, it would probably be limited enough to make it feasible to do something like "apt-get install fair ; fair-makefloppy /dev/fd0" just after installation and have it sort out everything needed.)
/* Steinar */