Hi, using Henning Sprang's How-To as a guideline I managed to successfully use the fai-setup/fai-make-nfsroot scripts for an Ubuntu installserver on a based on a Sarge system. Thank you for providing it, that was very helpful...
Also the client PC to be installed is successfully booting over the network using the installserver. The install process is also performing. However, there are two problems (probably related to each other) which I currently cannot resolve, perhaps somebody on the list has seen them before: a) For some reason the grub package is not installed and the installation log files (esp. software.log) is not very informative why. Effect is that the system is left in an unbootable state at the grub> prompt. b) When entering the needed information (kernel to be used etc) by hand at this prompt the system is booting but for whatever reasons in a very bad state. It seems that the /dev directory contains only very few devices like /dev/sg and things like that. Especially /dev/sd* are missing where the system has been installed on. The reasons seem to lie in the base.tgz file created by the fai-make-nfsroot script. When checking with 'tar tvzf base.tgz ./dev' I can see that it contains only an empty /dev directory. On the other hand the udev package is installed which should populate the /dev directory. Currently when booting the client PC with the nfsroot environment a /dev with all needed devices is created (by udevd), but of course in /tmp/target/dev no devices are available so all $ROOTCMD referring this directory with /dev/sda (e.g. during grub-configuration) won't find the appropiate devices. Changing /etc/udev/udev.conf on the running nfsroot environment one could change /dev to /tmp/target/dev but this cannot work as the udevd process is already started in /etc/rcS/S04udev whereas the new root partition on the harddisk to be installed is mounted later (of course) as the corresponding devices need to be created first... I hope this is not too confusing... :-) Anyway, perhaps some people have already solved these problems and can give me some adivce... The logfile for the nfsroot-creation (where esp. the base.tgz archive is created) is available: http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fai-setup.log And also the FAI-logfiles of the installation process itself are available: http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/software.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/FAI_CLASSES http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/additional.var http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/boot.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/cfengine.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/debconf.data http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/debconf.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/dhclient.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/disk_var.sh http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/dmesg.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/error.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fai.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fcopy.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/format.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/fstab http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/partition.sda http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/shell.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/status.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/syslog.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/updatebase.log http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder/variables.sh Thanks in advance!! Andreas -- Dr. Andreas Sindermann fon: +49 (221) 470-4201 Institut fuer Theoretische Physik fax: +49 (221) 470-5159 Universitaet zu Koeln Zuelpicher Str. 77 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] D-50937 Koeln, Germany http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~sinder