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

[Pierre Chapuis]

Le Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:17:48 +0100,
Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> 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).

-- 
catwell