FAI installation instructions
Hi everyone, I'm currently looking for a provisioning system in our company, and FAI looks very very promising. I read the whole manual, and all the other documentation (slides, articles, ...) I learned that one of the advantages is the high learning curve, which I'm experiencing right now :-) In order to do something about that, I want to create a nearly perfect step-by-step example instruction, for a real live situation like the one I am now. I would like to ask people to please help create this instruction set, so junior linux admins like me can advocate FAI further. I promise I will do everything to give feedback, adjust my blog post, make/adjust a wiki, ... so give back to the community my experiences. Please read my blog post at http://akoestica.be/blog/home/sysadmin/15-provisioning/49-installing-fai and help me create a very good install example. Can we do this using this mailinglist ? Thanks in advance. Kind regards, Jurgen Lamsens
Re: FAI installation instructions
Hi Jurgen, Thanks for your request. On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 1:55 PM, wrote: > In order to do something about that, I want to create a nearly perfect > step-by-step example instruction, for a real live situation like the one > I am now. It's hard to match everyone's situation with a single example. But that bing said, the Quickstart section of the FAI guide should do this. You might consider telling us what you think is missing there, and contribute changes to make this better instead of starting completely from scratch. But not problem, if you have a completely different idea of how a guide to FAI should look, you're free to use the wiki for whatever documentation you want to provide abput FAI. > I would like to ask people to please help create this instruction set, so > junior linux admins like me can advocate FAI further. For advocating, you probably rather want to tell people about the good things they get if they start using FAI(and what's bad not doing so), rather than an instruction on how to use it, because that's the second step ;) > Please read my blog post at > http://akoestica.be/blog/home/sysadmin/15-provisioning/49-installing-fai Interesting... Still, what I do not exactly get what you are abpout to do is: * do you want to understand yourself how to accomplish the task described in this article? * do want top bring more people to use FAI? * do you just want to help documentation better because you are missing something in the existing docs (FAI Guide, Wiki) > and help me create a very good install example. Can we do this using this > mailinglist ? Sure you can use this list for all things FAI and you should do so ;) Henning -- Henning Sprang http://www.sprang.de
Re: FAI installation instructions
Hi Henning, Thanks for your response. I answered below: > It's hard to match everyone's situation with a single example. But > that bing said, the Quickstart section of the FAI guide should do > this. > You might consider telling us what you think is missing there, and > contribute changes to make this better instead of starting completely > from scratch. > But not problem, if you have a completely different idea of how a > guide to FAI should look, you're free to use the wiki for whatever > documentation you want to provide abput FAI. First of all, I think you have some very good quality documentation there so thanks for that, but personally, I think the FAI section "2. Quickstart - For the impatient user" is very short/brief and not noob friendly :-) I think a new system administrator will rather profit from more clear and detailed step-by-step instructions, using a real life example, like at my blog. But indeed, maybe it's better to post my personal story in a wiki. > For advocating, you probably rather want to tell people about the good > things they get if they start using FAI(and what's bad not doing so), > rather than an instruction on how to use it, because that's the second > step ;) Good point there, but I want to be able to deploy my 3 OS'ses successfully, before FAI will be useful for me and I can start telling people how good it is :-) > Interesting... > Still, what I do not exactly get what you are abpout to do is: > * do you want to understand yourself how to accomplish the task > described in this article? > * do want top bring more people to use FAI? > * do you just want to help documentation better because you are > missing something in the existing docs (FAI Guide, Wiki) What I exactly want, is making FAI install Ubuntu 8.04/10.04 and CentOS 5.4 on Dell PE1X50/RX10 hardware, and documenting my journey by creating a step-by-step guide. I want to use Debian Lenny as installserver/mirrorhost (because I want FAI 3.5.5 and as far as I tested that's not possible on Ubuntu 8.04 because of a sylinux-common dependeny problem). In other words; I want my colleague sitting next to me to be able to setup the complete automatic provisioning system using my instructions at http://akoestica.be/blog/home/sysadmin/15-provisioning/49-installing-fai. The problem is; I'm stuck at creating the "minimal Ubuntu system/debootstrap" base image. In other words: what is the next step after: "apt-get install debootstrap" ? Thanks. Jurgen Lamsens
Re: FAI installation instructions
jurgen.lams...@telenet.be a écrit : [...] What I exactly want, is making FAI install Ubuntu 8.04/10.04 and CentOS 5.4 on Dell PE1X50/RX10 hardware, and documenting my journey by creating a step-by-step guide. I want to use Debian Lenny as installserver/mirrorhost (because I want FAI 3.5.5 and as far as I tested that's not possible on Ubuntu 8.04 because of a sylinux-common dependeny problem). In other words; I want my colleague sitting next to me to be able to setup the complete automatic provisioning system using my instructions at http://akoestica.be/blog/home/sysadmin/15-provisioning/49-installing-fai. The problem is; I'm stuck at creating the "minimal Ubuntu system/debootstrap" base image. In other words: what is the next step after: "apt-get install debootstrap" ? Roughly, it should be something like this: # debootstrap hardy /some/where/hardy http://some-ubuntu-mirror/ # tar zc -C /some/where/hardy -f /my/fai/config/basefiles/HARDY.tar.gz . And then add your host in /my/fai/config/class/50-host-class, with the HARDY variable, configure disk, packages, etc..., and start the installation. -- Nicolas
