This is going to be a bunch of random notes on FAI that'll help me
until I can get it all properly written down. Or something...
First of all, the fai-kernel packages are confusing as hell. The
.deb files enclose two other .deb files, with no documentation or
hint on what should come next. The tarball from the site is consists
mainly of a README that tells you to use the enclosed kernel
configuration file, and four kernel configuration files with no
indication of WTF you're supposed to do next. This is pissing me
off.
Here's what I've done so far; this is probably horribly wrong, but
we'll see how it goes.
First of all, I copied the kernel-config-2.4 file to
/usr/src/linux and ran make menuconfig. I made sure the
drivers for the network cards on the test machine were statically
included (not made modules), and ran make-kpkg as the README
said to.
Second, I took the produced .deb (put in /usr/src; as I
hadn't worked w/make-kpkg before, it took me a moment to figure this
out), copied it to tmp, and ran dpkg-deb -X kernel-package.deb .
to extract it. I copied boot/vmlinuz to /boot/fai/vmlinuz-install.
Third, I booted the machine. While the ethernet cards were found,
the thing complained that it was unable to mount /dev/nfs. I am
assuming this is because CONFIGNFSROOT was not installed
-- which in turn depends on CONFIGIPPNP_DHCP.
Fourth, I made another kpkg. Run step two again. (I'm doing this
part right now. If it turns out that the configuration options were
the problem, I'm going to be very pissed off about the lack of
documentation. I will probably feel badly about that tomorrow. But
right now I'm mad.)
SSH works; root password is "fai". I know, read the documentation.
Important directories:
/usr/share/fai/ /usr/local/share/fai /usr/lib/fai
Get it together!
E: Package cfengine has no installation candidate
From the mailing list: cfengine is in non-us. If you haven't mirrored that, you get this error.
That's just great. It took, like, a day to create a mirror, and now this. I don't even want cfengine, dammit!