FAI 2.1 released
Before the weekend starts, I going to release the next FAI release.
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) for Debian GNU/Linux
FAI is a non interactive system to install a Debian GNU/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 unattended 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, shell and Perl scripts. Using
FAI, an unattended and fully automated installation of a Linux cluster
which consists of 16 dual Pentium PC's and a beowulf cluster with 20
AMD 1 GHz nodes was performed.
FAI's target group are system administrators how have to install
Debian onto one or even hundreds of computers. Because it's a general
purpose installation tool, it can be used for installing a beowulf
cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm or a linux laboratory or
a classroom. Also large-scale linux networks with different hardware
and different installation requirements are easy to establish using
FAI.
All user visible news are now in the file NEWS. The file changelog is
for developers only. I like to mention three main news of this release.
1. hooks
Using hooks (like in emacs) you can add your own functions into the
installation process. I had this idea after the Debian One
conference in Bordeaux, where some people told me, that they need
some special functions during installation. Now FAI is very
flexible for this task. You only have to read the section about
hooks and write your own hooks.
(http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/fai-guide.html/ch-config.html#s-hooks
2. woody support
FAI 2.1 still uses the default configuration for installing
potato. But I tested it with woody, and it works fine. A lot of
package names have changed, so there's still some work to update
the list.
3. grub support
Also implemented but not the default boot loader yet.
The package is available at the FAI homepage
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
and also on the Debian mirrors in a few hours/days.
--
Thomas
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Thomas Lange
Institut fuer Informatik mailto:lange@informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE
Universitaet zu Koeln
Pohligstr. 1 Telefon: +49 221 470 5303
50969 Koeln Fax : +49 221 470 5317
1024D/AB9B66FD AEA6 A8C1 BD8E 67C4 8EF6 8BCA DC13 E54E AB9B 66FD
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