Before the weekend starts, I going to release the next FAI release. FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) for Debian GNU/Linux FAI is a non interactive system to install a Debian GNU/Linux operating system on a PC cluster. You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on the whole cluster, without any interaction necessary. Thus it's a scalable method for installing and updating a cluster unattended with little effort involved. FAI uses the Debian distribution and a collection of shell- and Perl-scripts for the installation process. Changes to the configuration files of the operating system are made by cfengine, shell and Perl scripts. Using FAI, an unattended and fully automated installation of a Linux cluster which consists of 16 dual Pentium PC's and a beowulf cluster with 20 AMD 1 GHz nodes was performed. FAI's target group are system administrators how have to install Debian onto one or even hundreds of computers. Because it's a general purpose installation tool, it can be used for installing a beowulf cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm or a linux laboratory or a classroom. Also large-scale linux networks with different hardware and different installation requirements are easy to establish using FAI. All user visible news are now in the file NEWS. The file changelog is for developers only. I like to mention three main news of this release. 1. hooks Using hooks (like in emacs) you can add your own functions into the installation process. I had this idea after the Debian One conference in Bordeaux, where some people told me, that they need some special functions during installation. Now FAI is very flexible for this task. You only have to read the section about hooks and write your own hooks. (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/fai-guide.html/ch-config.html#s-hooks 2. woody support FAI 2.1 still uses the default configuration for installing potato. But I tested it with woody, and it works fine. A lot of package names have changed, so there's still some work to update the list. 3. grub support Also implemented but not the default boot loader yet. The package is available at the FAI homepage http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ and also on the Debian mirrors in a few hours/days. -- Thomas ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Thomas Lange Institut fuer Informatik mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Universitaet zu Koeln Pohligstr. 1 Telefon: +49 221 470 5303 50969 Koeln Fax : +49 221 470 5317 1024D/AB9B66FD AEA6 A8C1 BD8E 67C4 8EF6 8BCA DC13 E54E AB9B 66FD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]