The following items are required for an installation via FAI.
apt-proxy(8)
is recommended if you install several computers.
fai-kernels
provides a default kernel
for fai.
The TFTP daemon and an NFS server will be enabled automatically when installing the FAI package. All clients must have a network card which is recognized by the install kernel.
The script mkdebmirror
[3] can be used for creating your own local Debian mirror. This
script uses the script debmirror(1)
and rsync(1)
. A
partial Debian mirror only for i386 architecture for Debian 3.1 (aka sarge)
without the source packages needs about 9.0GB of disk space. Accessing the
mirror via NFS will be the normal and fastest way in most cases. To see more
output from the script call mkdebmirror --debug. A root account
is not necessary to create and maintain the Debian mirror.
You can use the command fai-mirror(1)
for creating a partial
mirror, that only contains the software packages that are used in the classes
in your configuration space. To use HTTP access to the local Debian mirror,
install a web server and create a symlink to the local directory where your
mirror is located:
# apt-get install apache2 # ln -s /files/scratch/debmirror /var/www/debmirror
Create a file sources.list(5)
in /etc/fai
which gives
access to your Debian mirror. An example can be found in
/usr/share/doc/fai/examples/etc
. Also add the IP-address of the
HTTP server to the variable NFSROOT_ETC_HOSTS in
/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf
when the install clients have no
DNS access.
Before installing FAI, you have to install the package
fai-kernels
, which contains the install kernels for FAI. You can
install both packages using
kueppers[~]# apt-get install fai fai-kernels Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done Recommended packages: dhcp3 bootp The following NEW packages will be installed: fai fai-kernels 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B/12.1MB of archives. After unpacking 13.5MB of additional disk space will be used. Selecting previously deselected package fai. (Reading database ... 93589 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking fai (from .../f/fai/fai_2.8_all.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package fai-kernels. Unpacking fai-kernels (from .../fai-kernels_1.9_i386.deb) ... Setting up fai (2.8) ... Now edit fai.conf, make-fai-nfsroot.conf and sources.list in /etc/fai and call fai-setup. Setting up fai-kernels (1.9) ...
If you would like to install all recommended packages that are useful for fai, use the following command
# aptitude -r install fai fai-kernels Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Reading task descriptions... Done The following NEW packages will be automatically installed: binutils debootstrap dhcp3-server mtools nfs-kernel-server rsh-server syslinux tftpd-hpa Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
The suggested packages for FAI are: ssh, debmirror, mknbi, apt-move, mkinitrd-cd, grub.
You can also get the newest version of fai
and
fai-kernels
from the download page of fai and install the packages
using the dpkg
command.
The configuration for the FAI package (not the configuration data for the
install clients) is defined in /etc/fai/fai.conf
. Definitions
that are only used for creating the nfsroot are located in
/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf
. Edit these files before calling
fai-setup
. These are important variables in
/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf
:
debootstrap(8)
. It needs the location of a Debian mirror and the
name of the distribution (woody, sarge, sid) for which the basic Debian system
should be built.
/etc/fai/sources.list
instead.
make-kpkg(8)
-
which includes the default kernel for booting the install clients. The Debian
package fai-kernels
contains the default install kernels which
supports both the DHCP and BOOTP protocols.
These are important variables in /etc/fai/fai.conf
:
/usr/local/share/fai
but some like to use
/home/fai/config
or /var/fai/config
. Remember that
this directory must be exported to all install clients, so that all files can
be read by root.
The content of /etc/fai/sources.list
and FAI_DEBMIRROR
are used by the install server and also by the clients. If your install server
has multiple network cards and different hostnames for each card (as for a
Beowulf server), use the install server name which is known by the install
clients.
FAI uses apt-get(8)
to create the nfsroot filesystem in
/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot
. It needs about 230MB of free disk space.
Before setting up FAI, you should get the program imggen
,[4] if you like to boot from a 3Com
network card. This executable converts netboot images created by
mknbi-linux(8)
, so they can be booted by network cards from 3Com.
Put that executable in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin
). After
editing /etc/fai/fai.conf
and
/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf
call fai-setup
.
faiserver[~]# fai-setup Creating FAI nfsroot can take a long time and will need more than 230MB disk space in /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot. Creating nfsroot for sarge using debootstrap dpkg: base-passwd: dependency problems, but configuring anyway as you request: base-passwd depends on libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4); however: Package libc6 is not installed. dpkg: base-files: dependency problems, but configuring anyway as you request: . . . Creating base.tgz `/etc/fai/sources.list' -> `/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/apt/sources.list' Upgrading /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot Adding additional packages to /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot: module-init-tools dhcp3-client ssh file rdate hwinfo portmap bootpc rsync wget rsh-client less dump reiserfsprogs usbutils hdparm smartmontools parted mdadm lvm2 dnsutils ntpdate dosfstools cvs jove xfsprogs xfsdump sysutils dialog discover mdetect libnet-perl netcat libapt-pkg-perl grub lilo read-edid kudzu hwtools dmidecode Backing up any LVM2 metadata that may exist...done. Creating SSH2 RSA key; this may take some time ... Creating SSH2 DSA key; this may take some time ... Restarting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd. Checking available versions of rmt, updating links in /etc/alternatives ... (You may modify the symlinks there yourself if desired - see `man ln'.) Updating rmt (/usr/sbin/rmt) to point to /usr/sbin/rmt-dump. Updating rmt.8.gz (/usr/share/man/man8/rmt.8.gz) to point to /usr/share/man/man8/rmt-dump.8.gz. Recovering jove files ... Done. Error : Temporary failure in name resolution `/etc/fai/fai.conf' -> `/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/fai/fai.conf' `/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf' -> `/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf' `/etc/fai/menu.lst' -> `/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/fai/menu.lst' `/etc/fai/sources.list' -> `/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/fai/sources.list' Shadow passwords are now on. DHCP environment prepared. If you want to use it, you have to enable the dhcpd and the tftp-hpa daemon. Image Creator for MBA ROMs v1.00 Usage: imggen [OPTION] inputfile outputfile -a, Add 3Com MBA/BootWare support -r, Remove 3Com MBA/BootWare support from image file -i, Show information on an image -h, Help screen In filename: /boot/fai/installimage Out filename: /boot/fai/installimage_3com Adding MBA support... MBA support has been succesfully added BOOTP environment prepared. Removing `diversion of /sbin/discover-modprobe to /sbin/discover-modprobe.distrib by fai' make-fai-nfsroot finished properly. <= * Re-exporting directories for NFS kernel daemon...done. You have no FAI configuration. Copy the simple examples with: cp -a /usr/share/doc/fai/examples/simple/* /usr/local/share/fai Then change the configuration files to meet your local needs. FAI setup finished. <= *
A complete log of fai-setup is available on the fai web page. It's important that you will see both lines that are marked with an asterisk. Otherwise something went wrong. If you'll get a lot of blank lines, it's likely that you are using konsole, the X terminal emulation for KDE which has a bug. Try again using xterm.
The warning messages from dpkg about dependency problems can be ignored. If
you have problems running fai-setup, they usually stem from
make-fai-nfsroot(8)
. You may restart it by calling
'make-fai-nfsroot -r' (recover). Adding '-v' gives you a more verbose output
which may help you pinpoint the error. If you want to create a log file you
may use
sudo /usr/sbin/make-fai-nfsroot -r -v 2>&1 | tee make-fai-nfsroot.log
It may help to enter the chroot environment manually
sudo chroot /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot
The setup routine adds some lines to /etc/exports
to export the
nfsroot and the configuration space to all hosts that belong to the netgroup
faiclients. If you already export a parent directory of these
directories, you may comment out these lines, since the kernel NFS server has
problems exporting a directory and one of its subdirectories with different
options. All install clients must belong to this netgroup, in order to mount
these directories successfully. Netgroups are defined in
/etc/netgroup
or in the corresponding NIS map. An example for the
netgroup file can be found in
/usr/share/doc/fai/examples/etc/netgroup
. For more information,
read the manual pages netgroup(5)
and the NIS HOWTO. After
changing the netgroups, the NFS server has to reload its configuration. Use
one of the following commands, depending on which NFS server you are using:
kueppers# /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server reload kueppers# /etc/init.d/nfs-user-server reload
The setup also creates the account fai (defined by $LOGUSER) if
not already available. So you can add a user before calling
fai-setup(8)
using the command adduser(8)
and use
this as your local account for saving log files. The log files of all install
clients are saved to the home directory of this account. If you boot from
network card, you should change the primary group of this account, so this
account has write permissions to /boot/fai
in order to change the
symbolic links to the kernel image which is booted by a client.
After that, FAI is installed successfully on your server, but has no configuration for the install clients. Start with the examples from /usr/share/doc/fai/examples/simple/ using the copy command above and read Installation details, Chapter 6. Before you can set up a DHCP or BOOTP daemon, you should collect some network information of all your install clients. This is described in section Creating a boot floppy, Section 3.3.
When you make changes to /etc/fai/fai.conf
,
/etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf
the nfsroot has to be rebuilt by
calling make-fai-nfsroot(8)
. If you only like to install a new
kernel to the nfsroot add the flags -k or -K to
make-fai-nfsroot. This will not recreate your nfsroot, but only
updates your kernel and kernel modules inside the nfsroot
The setup of FAI adds the FAI account, exports file systems and calls
make-fai-nfsroot(8)
. If you call make-fai-nfsroot -v
you will see more messages. When using a local Debian mirror, it's important
that the install server can mount this directory via NFS. If this mount fails,
check /etc/exports
and /etc/netgroup
. An example can
be found in /usr/share/doc/fai/examples/etc/netgroup
.
FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)
FAI Guide version 2.5.2, 19 may 2005 for FAI package version 2.8lange@informatik.uni-koeln.de