DeveloperWorkshopJuly2010

General Information

Please, send a mail to Thomas if you want to join.

Date and Location

July 2.-4. 2010 at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. Linuxhotel in Essen: (Travel info, Anreise)

See [1] for generic information on community events (only in German language)

Sleeping, Eating, Drinking

Sleeping in the hotel, breakfast, coffee flatrate and drinks are included in the low fee we have to pay. We have to organize lunch and dinner on our own. In the past we managed to pay everything with the money from our sponsors, so you do not have to pay anything.

Cost/Sponsorship

We have pay some costs for every person:

• If n=number of persons, amount of money needed: n * 60 euros

Additional money is needed for food and maybe travel sponsorship

These companies sponsor the workshop:

• Netways
• Spotify
• Debian
• Thomas-Krenn.AG
• Linux Information Systems AG

Many thanks to our sponsors!

Participants/Registration

If you intend to participate, please mail to lange (ad) debian org.

Please don't forget to let us know some contact data.

• Thomas Lange
• Michael Prokop
• Sebastian Hetze
• Thomas Neumann
• Andreas Schuldei
• Mattias Jansson
• Michael Goetze
• Henning Sprang
• Manuel Hachtkemper
• Manuel Prinz, Stefan Hermann will join us for some time

Communication

We can talk on the usual IRC Channel and using the linux-fai-devel mailing list.

• Mailing list for announcement:

 [2]

Please subscribe to it if you are an (interested) participant. Import information about the event will be communicated there.

Agenda

Friday

• Setup of the network
• Introduction round, hello to everybody
• Define things that need to be worked on with high priority for the squeeze release
• Start of work

Saturday

• Work on things for squeeze release
• Discussion: Features for squeeze
• Read access from /dev/beer

Sunday

• Work on things for squeeze release
• Final round: What did we mangage to do this weekend, what will happen with the topics not done yet

Topic proposals for discussion and work

In this section, you can enter proposals for topics to work on, and things to discuss. Please add your name.

You can mark your topic with (D) or (W) to make clear it's a (D)iscussion or (W)ork topic.

Thomas, Mrfai

• which things changed in squeeze (for e.g. locale and keyboard settings via debconf?)
• config space via http, wget a compressed tar file of config space, maybe use lzma (W), patch from wlademar
• ainsl should supply more information in exit code (W)
• debian/rule with new debhelper version (W)
• fcopy and preinst, see #573044 (W)
• add new scripts: collect-mac, (W)
  • When adding more fai scripts that are to be run manually, please consider naming them fai-* so they can be found easier by users - e.g., tab completion starting with fai will show users all possible commands that come with fai! --lazyboy 15:54, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
• determine which files are changed in nfsroot by make-fai-nfsroot. The nfsroot would be more generic if install client could receive those files, instead of m-f-n writing them into the nfsroot, use dirinstall for creating the nfsroot? (D)
• new variable FAI_RAMDISK should hold a list of all directories which will be put into a ramdisk (W)
• order of packages in install_package. Is there need for a PRE and POST section? Packages which will be installed before/after all other packages? (D)
• simple progress bar using dialog/gauge or fai-progress or plymouth (D)
• enhance fcopy so it replaces variables in templates (D)
• use fcopy for sources.list in prepareapt (D)
• fcopy: remove -p (D)
• remove setup_harddisks (D)
  • Please not (yet) - there are still some cases known where setup-storage has problems and the old tool must be used! --lazyboy 15:54, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Thomas (the other one)

• simplify / straighten multi-OS support? (proper handling of difference between nfsroot and fai-client OS, refactoring prepareapt into a more general hook) (D?)
• add generic support for installing packages after fai-client has finished install and booted for the first time? (e.g. installation of vmware-tools packages) (W)

Mika

• sharing experiences of >2 years with using FAI's dirinstall in thousands of builds: which problems and limitations do we have to face with? What could be improved? (D)
• unit testing / automated testing FAI using Grml (see [3]): what's the idea behind it, what would be needed,... (D)
• release management of FAI: what could be improved, maintenance/feature/devel branches, ... (D)
• project management of FAI: how to attract new developers, what's missing from the upper POV,... (D)
• compare FAI with other deployment solutions (e.g. Cobbler) (D)
• discuss configuration management using cfengine vs. puppet vs. soft-updates (D)
• support retrieving sources of Debian packages in the build process (W)
• extraction of fai-setup-storage / make setup-storage work without FAI (see #575812) (W), Mrfai: I think it;s mostly done, maybe some missing documentation

Sebastian

• I would like to get FAI working with Ubuntu lucid. In particular, fai-cd with grub2 is an issue.

Documentation

A [http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2010/07/08/report-from-fai-developer-workshop-072010/ blog entry] about the weekend

Infrastructure of the Workshop LAN

sources.list entries - debian lenny/squeeze mirror and beta fai packages:

deb http://192.168.2.250/debian lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://192.168.2.250/debian squeeze main contrib non-free
deb http://192.168.2.250/cskoeln lenny koeln

Whiteboard-DHCP

• We use the 192.168.2.0/24 subnet
• Gateway: 192.168.2.250
• DNS:
• faiserver: 192.168.2.250
• ------------------------------------
• Mrfai: 250, 11
• Andreas: 4, 21, 31
• Sebastian: 49
• Henning S.: 33, 34, 35
• Mika: 23, 42