FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)
Chapter 5 How to plan your installation

Plan your installation, and FAI installs your plans.

Before starting your installation, you should spend much time in planing your installation. When you're happy with your installation concept, FAI can do all the boring, repeating tasks to put your plans into practice. FAI can't do good installations, if your concept is imperfect or lacks some important details. Start planing the installations by answering yourself following questions:

Will I create a Beowulf cluster, or do I have multiple workstations, each only used by a single user ?

How does my LAN topology looks like ?

Which applications will be run ?

Do the users need a queueing system ?

Do I have uniform hardware ?

Will the hardware stay uniform in the future ?

How should the hosts be named ?

How should the local hard disks be partitioned ?

Which software should be installed ?

Which daemons should be started, and how should the configuration for these looks like ?

Which remote filesystems should be mounted ?

Does the hardware needs a special kernel ?

You have also to think about user accounts, printing, mail, cron jobs, graphic cards, dual boot, NIS, NTP, timezone, keyboard layout, exporting and mounting directories via NFS and many other things. So, there's a lot to do before starting an installation. And remember that knowledge is power, and it's up to you to use it. Installation and administration is a process, not a product. FAI can't do things you don't tell it to do.

But you need not to start from scratch. Look at all files and scripts in the configuration space. There are a lot of things you can use for your own installation. A good paper with more aspects of building an infrastructure is http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/ "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure".