[plug] FAI, anyone?

[Daniel Pittman]

Marcos Raul Carot Collins <marcos.carot at gmail.com> writes:

> Actually, the scenario is quite different.  I just want to avoid the
> need to boot a netboot cd, and to go through the questions in the
> debian installer.

Fair enough. :)  I see that advice to that effect was posted elsewhere,
so will not comment further there, except...

> What I exactly want is to install as soon as I pxe boot a computer in
> a subnet to get a standard debian with KDE, with absolutely no need to
> be checking the computer, until all finishes (or an error happens).

...that isn't going through the questions, that is an automated
install.  In any case, as another poster offered, a preseed file should
be sufficient.

[...]

> I do appreciate all you shared with us, and obviously is a lot of
> great advices that would be great in a business / production
> environment :) Thanks for that!

No problem.

> The part that I don't understand is how a class is (automatically?)
> selected.

Other than a class matching the hostname, and possibly one or two
others, no class is "automatically" selected.

This manual page describes the tool that discovers the list of classes:

http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/doc/man/fai-class.html

As it notes, it runs all the scripts in a given directory -- the classes
directory, IIRC, which should be present in the default examples.

So, to add a new class you would write something like this:

    #!/bin/sh
    # .../20-kde-machine
    echo "KDE"

You can also see the more sophisticated examples in that manual page.

So, yeah: write your scripts in whatever language, and have them emit
the classes to STDOUT.  FAI then uses that set for the rest of the
process.

> If I have only one class, I am not sure how to write it too... I mean,
> the example that comes with FAI has some logic built in that I am not
> sure if it HAS to be there, or I just could delete everything under
> /srv/fai/config and do my own.

You could get rid of more or less everything that is there by default
and write your own.

Regards,
        Daniel