Hi, I was recently on the forum talking to Dieter about AIF (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=96548) to see how much work should I do to have a usable kickstart-like system for ArchLinux. As I said there already, I'm currently using ArchLinux in an HPC cluster at my faculty. Previously we used RocksClusters (RedHat based, yuck) which was a real pain. Nonetheless, it had a really automated auto-installation system which RedHat calls "kickstart" (Ubuntu now has some support for this). To migrate to ArchLinux I had to develop a custom installation initcpio image which included a set of scripts that take care of: 1) booting through PXE to retrieve kernel and this image 2) autodetecting ethernet hardware and then running dhcp 3) wget'ing to the master node (DHCP server) to retrieve a .tar.gz which contains the instructions on how this particular node (based on MAC) should be installed, along the rest of the scripts (this second part was to minimize the need to rebuild the image while developing this system) that took care of actually performing installation. These scripts took care of everything that the user needed to do to get a fully configured and bootable system (including custom packages and postinstall scripts, if desired). The problem is that maintaining these scripts became a pain since Arch is a fast moving target. AIF now seems like the sane and officially supported tool to base this system on. Well, with this introduction I wanted to say that I attempt to update my system to use AIF so that whenever this is ready I can upgrade my currently aging ArchLinux installation (I don't to upgrades to avoid breakages, I took a snapshot of the repositories a year ago). I'm not sure If I will eventually accomplish this (maybe it takes too much work and I get tired again and quit), but for the moment I'll try to get familiar with AIF and see where I can get. Hopefully I can even contribute to its development. And regarding this last point, I wanted to keep bothering you with questions about AIF so that I can understand more on how it works and how it should be used (I've read the code but it gets a little complex in some parts). So, my first question is: how can I comfortably test and extend aif within a VirtualBox VM? I've read about the idea of cloning the repo inside the VM @ GitHub, but it seems I would have to repackage and install aif everytime I change something. Also, even if I did that, I would have to repeat it after every boot of this VM, since I can't persist those changes across reboots. Thanks and sorry about the long post! Matt (or v01d, the nick I use everywhere else). PS: the code I've developed is at http://github.com/v01d/archcluster