FAI technical questions/issues i'm trying to setup FAI on a debian 3.0r2 woody machine.
slice:/# uname -a Linux slice 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i686 unknown i know this is a fairly old kernel, is this an issue in regards to getting fai working? i'm using fai v2.5.4 and fai-kernels v1.6. i've managed to build a debian mirror. so far i've encountered several problems. a) when running make-fai-nfsroot, it died trying to run mknbi-linux, it complained that --outfile was not a valid option, and that --ip=any was an invalid host original line: mknbi-linux --ip=any --output=/boot/fai/installimage \ $NFSROOT/boot/$kfile-$KERNELVERSION i changed this to mknbi-linux --outfile=/boot/fai/installimage \ $NFSROOT/boot/$kfile-$KERNELVERSION why is this error occurring? how to fix? are my changes going to cause problems later on? b) when running make-fai-nfsroot, it complained about unresolved symbols when running depmod: chroot $NFSROOT depmod -a -F /boot/System.map-$KERNELVERSION $KERNELVERSION || true (KERNELVERSION is: 2.4.24-fai) there were 508 unresolved symbols. examples: depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.24- fai/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/cpuid.o depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.24- fai/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/microcode.o depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.24- fai/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/msr.o ... why is this happening? how to fix? i commented out the depmod line from the script - is this going to cause problems later? c) after creating a boot disk and connecting to the nfs root, it sucessfully deployed the system to the target host via NFS. however, i noticed the kernel had not been installed, and was thus unable to boot into linux. why is this happening? how do i fix this? i believe it has something to do with correctly setting the following two variables in /usr/local/share/fai/class/DEFAULT.var: #kernelversion=2.4.24 # for the packages kernel-doc and kernel- source #addpackages="kernel-image-2.4.24-2-386" however, what do i set these to? i tried a variety of combinations but no luck. do i need to have a valid kernel-image-<version>.deb file installed in /usr/local/share/fai/files ? if so, what would be a suitable version (the host i'm building is going into production and would require a kernel from the stable branch). do i need to set both "kernelversion" and "addpackages" ? if i have a kernel-image file called: kernel-image-2.4.18-686_2.4.18-5_i386.deb then do i set the addpackages to "kernel-image-2.4.18-686" or "kernel-image-2.4.18-686_2.4.18-5_i386" or "kernel-image-2.4.18-686_2.4.18-5_i386.deb" or what? i found this step to be not very clearly explained in existing documentation. d) my target host is getting its IP via DHCP, 172.30.1.132, and its hostname is thus being set to the name "172.30.1.132" - is there any way to change the hostname to something else like "demohost" ? (note: i do not have access to the DHCP server, which is most likely running on a windows box anyhow). i had to edit /usr/local/share/fai/class/LAST.var to set FAI_ACTION to install: mktable() { # Here, you have to add all your hosts # This is the table: host -> action cat <<-EOT 172 install 172.30.1.132 install kueppers install bigfoot sysinfo pittermaennche install EOT } is this correct? d2) when i deployed the FAI to the host target, it issued a warning saying the System.map-2.4.24-fai contained unresolved symbols. i renamed this file to avoid the warning, why is this happening? how to fix? e) how is are the files deployed to the host machine, are they .deb files which are installed via dpkg? or is it just a straight copy of the $NFSROOT? f) when i build the $NFSROOT, will it copy all files in my local debian mirror? at the moment i have a minimal partial debian mirror, i'd like to add extra packages like mysql, can i just add these to my local partial debian mirror, re-run make-fai-nfsroot, and hey-presto, target hosts will have mysql on them too? g) i'd eventually like to boot off CD instead of through the network. would i still need to install these utilities, particularly the network related ones: packages="dhcp3-client ssh portmap file rdate cfengine cvs bootpc rsync wget rsh-client less dump reiserfsprogs dpkg-dev ext2resize hdparm parted dnsutils ntpdate dosfstools sysutils dialog discover mdetect libnet- perl netcat" ? i'm attempting to use fai-bootcd from http://members.iinet.net.au/~niall/fai/. i'm somewhat confused as to what versions of fai and fai-bootcd i should use. i obtained the latest versions of fai and fai-kernels off the fai homepage, however, the fai-bootcd utility will not work with the latest version of fai on woody (which is what i'm running). can i force the install and hack it to work? what is my best option for creating a fully automated installation off cd rom? should i be using sid to create the NFSROOT and .iso cd image? or should i downgrade fai to a version supported by the "stable" version of fai-bootcd (ie fai <= 2.3.4)? any light shed on this subject would be very much appreciated. h) fai-boot cd question: according to the documentation, in: /usr/share/doc/fai-bootcd/fai-bootcd.HOWTO.gz it says Your kernel on the machine where you are building the FAI BootCD must have loopback support compiled as a module. The following option must be set in your .config CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LOOP=m does this mean the kernel that ends up on the host machine requires this as a module? will it fail if you have this option set to "y" ? why must this be as a module? it also mentios that these options must be set in the FAI kernel: The following extra options must be applied: CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y CONFIG_IDE=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y CONFIG_ISO9660_FS=y CONFIG_EXT2_FS=y CONFIG_ZISOFS_FS=y does this mean i must RECOMPILE the fai kernel with these options? or can i set these options in: /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/etc/kernel-img.conf ? (what does the file "kernel-img.conf" do, incidentally?) my ultimate goal of building a fully self-contained automated installation of debian on CD seems like pretty hard work. is fai/fai-bootcd the right road to take? i've done a bit of research, there appears to be other tools like progeny autoinstall (no longer supported?) and (systemimager.org - this creates an 'image' ? good if you have several machines of some hardware, but i will be deploying my fai bootable cd to various hardware spec'd machines...) .. any thoughts on this? thanks all for any help you can provide. i can certainly see the potential and power of fai but have pretty much failed to unleash any of that power at this stage. alex.