Hi! I have a FAI server running and can successfully install VMware virtual machines with different operating systems and releases. Now I'm looking into preparing a CD to do the same with real hardware.
We have a network using many different VLANs and I can use the VMware API to create a VM in the FAI VLAN for doing the install and move it to the correct VLAN later. This is not feasible for a hardware system and therefore I need to do the installation without any working network connection. I used fai-mirror and fai-cd to create one image for Debian-10 and one image for Ubuntu-18.04. Now I'm looking into two aspects to make it easier and maybe have someone less experienced do the installation: Idea 1: have only one CD image and use profiles to select the OS to install Is this doable? It seems that fai-mirror can only create a mirror for one OS. Debian and Ubuntu have multiple packages using the same name and trying to put both operating systems into the same mirror directory does not seem to work. How about a non-Debian mirror? Is there any documentation about creating a CentOS mirror usable with fai-cd? Idea 2: use one CD image for one OS but use profiles to configure options I want to use profiles to decide if the machine should have the Puppet agent and configuration added during installation. I already have this working for VMs where I can add the class to the kernel commandline for a specific node. I would like to avoid an additional CD image for this and it looks that profiles could be the way to ask the user about this. It seems that all profiles in the config space are included in the image. Is there an easy way to include one set of profiles for a Debian CD and another set of profiles for an Ubuntu CD? I'm thinking about creating a temporary copy of the config space and include that after removing the unneeded profiles. I am missing something here? -- Stefan
