Main Page

Hello and welcome to the FAI wiki.

This is a public wiki for FAI - Fully Automatic Installation - a tool for automatic installation of Debian and other Linux Distributions. It's a place for users and developers of FAI to share information. If you have some information on FAI to share, see the page wiki registration - you need to write a mail, because we can't handle the spam otherwise. Also, please read editing rules.

getting FAI

if you want the latest and greatest version:

• download it from: http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download/
• add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list, as well as /etc/fai/apt/sources.list(to get the correct fai-nfsroot package into the nfsroot) - depending on which flavor you want:

deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download sarge koeln
deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download etch koeln
deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download developers koeln

• install it within debian sid
• check out the sources from subversion:

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai/trunk fai-sources

(will require building the package by entering the directory and do something like "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot")

documentation and examples

• Main documentation for FAI is the fai guide - it's available in multipl languages:
  • english
  • french
  • romanian
  • Search it via link google sitesearch
• FAI Homepage
• Howtos
• helper scripts - add-on scripts that help using FAI
• Resources - there are some information resources about FAI available "out there", as well as some unofficial developer branches, that are handled somewhere else until that code is incoporated in the FAI main Branch - and we want to point to them.
• user FAQ ( from questions in the mailing list and on IRC irc.debian.org #fai) - We took the contents of the old and somewhat unmaintained fai faqmatic to this wiki to have all information more centralized. Please use the Wiki from now on.
• linux-fai mailing list infos (Netiquette, how to subscribe and use)
• reporting bugs and also maybe find fixes for problems that you might encounter when using FAI.
• Success Stories - who is using FAI, how and why - and, when available pictures of the machines installed with FAI :)
• User reports by filling out the FAI questionnaire (TODO: create a webform for this)
• this wiki needs a Logo

• a short tutorial on www.debian-administration.org
• a talk on fai and debian

• A visual overview of how all the pieces of an FAI installation fit together.

• Two Articles of how people ue FAI for some clusters:
  • Graphical rendering: http://viz.aset.psu.edu/ga5in/DisplayWallBuild.html
  • Global Optimization computing cluster: http://globopt.dsi.unifi.it/gol/cluster.html

Developer information

• Stuff for people interested in helping with FAI: Developers information
• A new partitioning tool: setup_harddisks_2
• An approach using template toolkit in FAI

Wiki Information

• About this Wiki - info on this wiki
• help for editing (mainly mediawiki documentation links)
• editing rules - some ideas that make collaborative work here easier
• practice wiki writing here
• FAI Wiki Administration Coordination - some infos on managing this wiki