[arch-releng] Kickstarting ArchLinux

[v01d]

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