FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)
Chapter 9 Various Hints

This chapter has various hints which may not be explained in great detail.

Use mkdivert[21] if a postinst script calls a configuration program eg. the postinst script for package apache calls apacheconfig needs manual input. You can fake the configuration programm so the installation can be fully automatic. But don't forget to use rmdivert to remove this faked script.

During the installation you can execute commands inside the newly installed system in a chroot environment by using chroot /tmp/target or just $ROOTCMD followed by the command you want to call for eg. $ROOTCMD dpkg -l show the packages installed to the new system.

The only task, which has to be done manually for new hardware, is to assign the MAC address to a hostname and to an IP address and define classes for this host.

There's a tradeoff between writing a few large configuration scripts, or many short scripts, one for each class. Large scripts can distinguish classes by using case statements or the ifclass test.

If your computer can't boot from network card you need not always boot from floppy. Define a partition /fai-boot in your disk_config configuration file. Then the class FAI_BOOTPART will automaticly defined and will create a lilo entry for booting the FAI bootfloppy from this partition. So you can start the reinstallation without a boot floppy. This will also make the test phase shorter, since booting from hard disk is much faster than booting from floppy.