User FAQ

What's the official website for FAI?

http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai

What order are scripts executed in?

Scripts are executed in class definition order, and in numerical order within each class.

For example, if the classes FOO and BAR were defined (in that order), and $FAI_CONFIGDIR/scripts/FOO contained S20 and S40, and $FAI_CONFIGDIR/scripts/BAR contained S30, the order of execution would be:

1. $FAI_CONFIGDIR/scripts/FOO/S20
2. $FAI_CONFIGDIR/scripts/FOO/S40
3. $FAI_CONFIGDIR/scripts/BAR/S30

make-fai-nfsroot dies silently, Why?

Restarted it with more debug output (-v) and (-r) to recover yielded: Reading Package Lists...

E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room E: Error occured while processing 
phpgroupware-
netsaint (NewPackage) E: Problem with MergeList 
/var/lib/apt/lists/172.25.1.52:9999
_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages E: The package lists or
status file could not be parsed or opened.

Reason: As I my default /etc/apt/sources.list read in stable, testing and unstable, apt-get needs a lot of space for its internal tables. Therefore I had also a special apt.conf which is missing in the nfsroot of FAI. This is a known problem of apt.

Solution: Copied /etc/apt/sources to /etc/fai/sources.list, then minimised it to contain just one version (e.g. stable) of Debian

ngiger@mus.ch

Why does the system reboot after entering ctrl-c following an installation?

The default actions for FAI do not allow you to get a shell since it is insecure and it will reboot on <ctrl-c> by design.

If you want to get a shell you need to change FAI's actions by adding 'createvt' to the FAI_FLAGS variable that is passed to the kernel on startup. You can do this via fai-chboot (e.g. fai-chboot -iFv -k "FAI_ACTION=install" hostname) for network installs or for floppy installs you can use something similar to make-fai-bootfloppy "FAI_FLAGS=verbose,createvt,sshd".

dawsons@augsburg.edu

I'm new to FAI. How should I start ?

• Read the FAI guide and this FAQ.
• Start with the simple examples by copying them to FAI_CONFIGDIR.
• Install the stable distribution on your first clients!

debian@layer-acht.de