Installing Ubuntu Linux with FAI

intro

It's possible and quite easy to install Ubuntu Linux with FAI - Fully Automatic Installation on this page. I used to write some stuff explaining how to do it on this page.

Instead of giving you strange things to read about a strange hack I did, I made some new patches and packages to get FAI to install Ubuntu Linux in a nice manner that doesn't interfere with FAI itself, and needs very little changes to FAI, so it's easily maintainable.

This stuff is still quite beta stage, I made extensive tests, as far as one person with 4 computers can do, and nothing bad happened, but that's not a lot testing, for my taste. Strange things can happen when you use it, so do not use it in a production environment before test it extensively yourself.

Please ask on linux-fai in case something goes wrong. Success reports are also welcome.

Download:

get all the debs you find here: http://www.sprang.de/download/fai-multi-distribution/

usage:

• install the deb's from the download location, including the package fai-distributions (look into it to see what it is about), excluding the package fai-nfsroot
• do everything you'd do with any other FAI install - read this wiki and the FAI-guide on how to do that.
• copy example classes as usual in FAI
• copy additional example classes:

cp -a /usr/share/doc/fai-doc/examples/classes/*/* /usr/local/share/fai/

• run make-fai-nfsroot
• run /usr/lib/fai/dists/ubuntu_hoary/make-base-tgz ( in lib because it should be called from make-fai-nfsroot)
• run /usr/lib/fai/dists/ubuntu_breezy/make-base-tgz
• name your install clients sarge, hoary, and breezy in DNS , or add them to the same classes as these example host configurations and install them as usual

(interesting?)facts:

• It only needs one nfsroot for all.
• it is (in my tests) 100% compatible to an existing configdir, and to FAI 2.9 as long as you do not to use the variable DISTRIBUTION in your existing configdir - if you use it, you should use it as shown in the example configdir you copied above
• everyting only tested with intel machines
• network install only - fai-cd and fai-mirror will need some love and script-tweaking, as far as I can say
• see the README.multi-distribution file in the package

known issues/todo:

• the dirty way how I include Ubuntu's debootstrap packages must be cleaned up - I want a script to download the appropriate package needed for bootstrapping a specific distribution, because this package will probably not be available in Debian, or not be in sync with Debian or fai releases, and I want to give users a way high flexibility in the choice of version of the distribution to be installed (work in progress)
• would be nice if make-fai-nfsroot would also(or exclusively) run /usr/lib/fai/dists/*/make-base-tgz - it's not nice force the user run these manually. maybe we should also have a script in /usr/sbin/ for that. how about make-fai-base-image [DISTRIBUTION|all]?

notes:

• there's also another howto to install Ubuntu with FAI (I didn't try it yet): http://www.hpc2n.umu.se/support/showdoc.html?txt=admin/fai/ubuntu