Any FAI success stories?

[Michael Jinks <mjinks@uchicago.edu>]

Hi all.

Been spending the last couple of weeks, off and on, trying to get an FAI
setup to work for a cluster I'm trying to build.  At this point I'm
starting to wonder if FAI works for anybody; I've had to make lots of
kludgey adjustments to its scripts, moved files around so that FAI can
find them, and now I'm stuck because the way that FAI expects to use
DHCP won't work.  After booting the client and mounting / read-only, it
calls dhclient to get some variables to use in deciding what sort of
action to take; but dhclient expects to write to /var/run, which is part
of / at this stage, thus read-only, so dhclient dies.  (Even this is
further along than I got at first; the current version of dhclient
appears to behave completely differently from the one FAI expects to
use, so I had to downgrade to the 2.2.x series just to get the command
line options to make sense.)

I can probably work something out, like writing in an extra clause in
FAI's scripts so that /var/run is a tmpfs filesystem or something, but
after many similar hacks I'm starting to wonder, does anybody actually
use FAI successfully?  And if not, is there a better option out there
that I haven't been able to google?

Thanks,
-mrj
-- 
# Michael Jinks, IB # JFI/MRSEC/EFI Computing # University of Chicago #
      Reader!  Think not that
      technical information
      ought not be called speech;  -- Anonymous, "How to decrypt a DVD"