Re: [arch-general] Arch Linux automatic (prescripted) installer/deployment tool

Pierre Chapuis wrote:

Le Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:17:48 +0100, Dieter Plaetinck a écrit :

...

Does anyone have thoughts, ideas, requirements, ...?

Sounds good. I've worked with FAI (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/), which is powerful but a bit too complex. Its concepts are still good:

- Hooks at many times of the setup procedure to run scripts.

- Can be run from any media, such as CD-ROM or a mounted NFS drive after a PXE boot.

- Error-tolerant, but everything is logged on each client.

- Class-based: you define actions that belong to classes, then define the classes you want to run for each machine. It allows to make similar installations on machines that don't have the same hardware and need different drivers, for example.

- Can run scripts in many languages including Bash, Perl, cfagent...

Maybe you could take a look at it before starting, maybe even reuse some code (it's mostly made of Bash scripts).

I know FAI. installed hundreds of servers with it at work :-) It's quite good indeed. I didn't know you could run it from cdroms (we always booted it through pxe) My end goal is to use AIF as much as possible, and being able to use the environment generated by mkiso and similar scripts for both the installercd and pxe. I haven't looked at the fai source code yet though, I'll take a look . Dieter