FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)

Abstract

This manual describes the fully automatic installation package for Debian GNU/Linux. This includes the installation of the package, the planing and creating of the configuration and how to deal with errors.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © 2000-2001 Thomas Lange

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at the GNU website. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Motivation
  • 1.2 Overview and concepts
  • 1.3 How does FAI work ?
  • 1.4 Features
• 2 Installing FAI
  • 2.1 Requirements
  • 2.2 How to create a local Debian mirror
  • 2.3 Setting up FAI
    • 2.3.1 Troubleshooting the setup
• 3 Preparing booting
  • 3.1 Booting from 3Com network card with boot PROM
  • 3.2 Booting from network card with a PXE conforming boot ROM
  • 3.3 Creating a boot floppy
  • 3.4 Collecting Ethernet addresses
  • 3.5 Configuration of the BOOTP daemon
    • 3.5.1 Troubleshooting BOOTP daemon
  • 3.6 Configuration of the DHCP daemon
  • 3.7 Boot messages
  • 3.8 Collecting other system information
  • 3.9 Checking parameters from BOOTP and DHCP servers
  • 3.10 Rebooting the computer
• 4 Overview of the installation sequence
  • 4.1 Set up FAI
  • 4.2 Defining classes, variables and loading kernel modules
  • 4.3 Partitioning local disks, creating filesystems
  • 4.4 Installing software packages
  • 4.5 Site specific configuration
  • 4.6 Save log files
  • 4.7 Reboot the new installed system
• 5 How to plan your installation
• 6 Installation details
  • 6.1 The configuration space
  • 6.2 The default tasks
  • 6.3 The setup routines of the install clients
  • 6.4 The class concept
  • 6.5 Defining classes
  • 6.6 Variables in class/*.var
  • 6.7 Hard disk configuration
  • 6.8 Software package configuration
  • 6.9 Scripts in /fai/scripts
    • 6.9.1 Shell scripts
    • 6.9.2 Perl scripts
    • 6.9.3 Expect scripts
    • 6.9.4 Cfengine scripts
  • 6.10 Changing the boot device
  • 6.11 Hooks
  • 6.12 Looking for errors
• 7 How to build a Beowulf cluster using FAI
  • 7.1 Planing the Beowulf setup
  • 7.2 Set up the master server
    • 7.2.1 Set up the network
    • 7.2.2 Setting up NIS
    • 7.2.3 Create a local Debian mirror
    • 7.2.4 Install FAI package on the master server
    • 7.2.5 Prepare network booting
  • 7.3 Tools for Beowulf cluster
  • 7.4 Wake on LAN with 3Com network cards
• 8 FAI on SUN SPARC
• 9 Various Hints