Installing a VServer guest with debootstrap and softupdate
Many people don't use the -m fai VServer build method (maybe because it's broken?) but build their VServer guests without FAI, using debootstrap or any other standard method. A guest installed like that will now nothing about FAI, so in order to turn it into a FAI install client, some manual extra steps are necessary at least once. There are also some pitfalls.
Your guest cannot NFS mount by default
For security reasons, the defaults do not allow a VServer guest to perform NFS mounts. In case your FAI config space lives on a separate physical server and therefore needs to be mounted through NFS, this will lead to a permission denied error.
To fix this problem, on the VServer host, create a file called
/etc/vservers/<vserver>/bcapabilities
with the following content:
CAP_SYS_ADMIN
If your VServer guest was already running, make sure to re-start it for these settings to become effective. (Q: Would there be a parameter to set this at guest build time???)
You need a FAI client on your guest
Before you can do anything else, you will need to install the fai-client package:
aptitude install fai-client
The FAI client needs to know about your config space
In /etc/fai/fai.conf look for the line:
- FAI_CONFIG_SRC=nfs://yourserver/$FAI_CONFIGDIR
Uncomment and replace yourserver with the hostname of the sevrer that is exporting your config space via NFS.
We don't know our FAI classes yet
Make sure to run
fai softupdate -N
as the -N option will make sure that the class detection for your VServer guest is done from scratch. Without the -N option, you will just see an error message saying that /var/log/fai/classes was not found.