Hi, I just installed fai-2.6 in a sarge chroot on two woody machines (one i386, one powerpc), here are my remarks:
The fai package recommends: syslinux and suggests: mknbi - both are i386 only. It would be nice (if possible) if these were arch-spezific. The default values of FAI_LOCATION (/usr/local/share/fai) and NFSROOT (/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot) violate FHS 2.2. Should be /var/lib/fai/config and /var/lib/fai/nfsroot, where I would even prefer /var/lib/fai/nfsroot/$ARCH Thomas, we've already talked about this and FHS 2.3 (which is current, but not used in sarge) says, FAI should use the new /srv-hierarchy instead, so you said, you don't want to change the paths to not confuse people who are used to FAI twice. I really think /usr/local/share/fai is a serious bug against debian policies - but if noone else complains I won't submit it as a serious bug. Line 36 in /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf says "# following lines should be read only for you" - this is obviously (see below) only true if using i386. /usr/share/doc/fai/README.package_problems is mostly outdated and thus confusing / frightening, esp. after "The following table describes the problems with postinstall scripts." - I would suggest a rewrite. /usr/share/doc/links.html could include " * FAI on linux for powerpc: http://www.layer-acht.org/fai"; - I definitly update that page in future! and even before sarge is released ;-) Regarding the package fai-kernels I came up with the idea of making it arch-independed - with arch-specific kernel packages included. So we could start with three/four? packages inside (kernel-image.debs for i386, ppc, sparc and maybe amd64) - there is a working kernel-image.deb for ppc on layer-acht.org already, although at the moment it's to big to fit on a floppy. (fine for booting from net, hd or cd) packages.qa.debian.org/fai says "The package should be updated to follow the last version of Debian Policy (Standards-Version 3.6.1 instead of 3.5.6)." In /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf for powerpc I had to prepend FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS slightly differently: FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS="--arch powerpc --exclude=grub,lilo,dmidecode,read-edid,hwtools,pcmcia-cs,ppp,pppconfig,pppoe,pppoeconf,dhcp-client,exim4,exim4-base,exim4-config,exim4-daemon-light,mailx,at,fdutils,info,modconf,libident,logrotate,exim" To packages for powerpc I had to add "quik yaboot" (powerpc bootloaders). make-fai-nfsroot fails/stops after: Creating base.tgz mkdir: cannot create directory /var/lib/fai/nfsroot/var/state': File exists No diversion Diversion of /sbin/discover-modprobe by fai', none removed Unfortunatly I don't have the time _now_ (maybe tonite, hopefully tomorrow) to look further into it, why this happens. make-fai-nfsroot on i386 worked just fine here. so far, so good ;-) regards, Holger P.S.: I'll keep an eye on these problems/issues and submit regular bug reports within the next days if neccessary.
