Kickstart support info

[Marc MERLIN]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 01:17:28AM +0200, Henning Sprang wrote:
> > That's the major point: FAI works better when all the clients are the same.
> > Mine aren't really, and having an installer that can detect as much as
> > possible at install time and adjust accordingly.
> > So the d-i is a better option for what I need
> 
> Please don't see this as I want to tell you you're not the one knowing
> best what's good for you, but I want to reply to some things I see FAI
> misunderstood above, maybe even the FAI website is somewhat misleading
> because it shows a lot information about cluster installation, but:
 
Thanks for fixing that up and the details.
 
> Actually, where I work we use FAI to install 60 systems, over 40 of
> them VMware, and with around 30 different configurations (even a
> couple of specialities for single hosts), with Debian woody, but all
> from within one config space, no system-images or anything like that
> involved at all. At home, I even installl Debian and Ubuntu from
> within the same config space.

Gotcha

> FAI is basically a collection of shell scripts, running in a root file
> system mounted via NFS, after the system has booted from PXE-boot or
> floppy, assigning the install client it is running on to several

Right. That was one of the things. I mostly do network installs, but in some
cases, I do installs in places with DHCP or PXE capability. My install needs
to be able to be put entirely on a DVD for places with very low network
bandwidth

> classes based on a multitude of attributes from hostname over disk
> size and other hardware information like graphics card and other
> things - basically it can use any kind of information gathered by any
> shell/perl script, discover and kudzu to assign classes and comes with
> a number of examples making use of this information and doing some
> common things based on theses discoverings.
> Then, based on this class assignment, FAI partitions and formats the
> harddisk, installs packages, and runs any script (BASH, Perl, cfengine
> is supported by default) you define to be belonging to that class, and
> copies specific files on the harddisk of the install target,
> everything without any manual interaction.
 
Gotcha.
 
> The motto of FAI is: "plan your installation and FAI installs your
> plan" - So, if you'd like to, you can configure FAI so it assigns the
> class FILESERVER or THINCLIENT just based on size of the disk found in
> the client at install time, and let it install any packages need by
> one of these, install packages, copy config files, edit config files
> to adjust anything that might be different on an indivindual machine
> or whatever you can imagine. It is extremly flexible and all that

I do that with my install too, in %post.

> doesn't need to be touched manually when configured once. Only if you
> wanted, you even _could_ for example, show an interactive question
> while installation, just in case you might want to manually decide if
> an install client should be assigned to the class "FULL_DESKTOP" or
> "LIGHT_DESKTOP"

Right.

> There are other features upcoming since the newest and previous
> release, like debconf preseeding, option to put the whole config space
> and any packages needed by the classes on a bootable cd for
> non-network installation (fai-cd) , as well as possibility to do not

Nice.

> only installations, but also system updates that do anything classes
> can do described above without full reinstallation. One guy, Holger
> Levsen is doing some things to use FAI inside d-i for some tasks, too,
> and vice versa, because one can do some things the other can't, but I
> am not deeply enough involved with that to tell details about...
> 
> Anyhow, if you're accustomed to kickstart and using a graphical
> frontend, FAI might be not intuitive enough or too much to learn, i
> just wanted to give better information because i felt there wa a
> misconception of a tool I find very nice and feel it has what I
> understood you need.

and you have done that.
While it sounds like much more work to setup, it seems to also be worth it
depending on what kind of installs you have and need (and maybe how much
luck I have with the regular installer)

Thanks for the details
Marc
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