Hi, this friday I decide to look what competition offers for automated/unattended installation. Here are some of my notes:
Available: debian: https://wiki.debian.org/AutomatedInstallation including FAI ubuntu: kickstart compatibility https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility redhat: kickstart https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/installation_guide/sect-kickstart-howto Kickstart text file with syntax. Recommended way for creation is cloning of manual installation. Also UI is available, but does not support advanced partitioning and not for everyone. Interesting feature is that kickstart allow to specify on failure script (both user error %onerror and program error %traceback ) which is executed when fatal failure happen. This is often used for debugging and error reporting. Also all pre,post,etc script has option --erroronfail which makes failure of script fatal for whole installation. What I really like about kickstart documentation is that they mention when it is introduced, when it is deprecated and when it is removed for each option. I have to say also that I found kickstart file more readable then autoyast XML. See examples at http://www.stratuslab.eu/fp7/doku.php/tutorial:baseimagecreationkickstart.html and I think you get quickly idea what each line means. Kickstart allows composition using including of other files. This is used for dynamic content together with pre script and include of file generated by script. What surprise me that autoyast allows much more schemas to locate its file. E.g. ftp is not supported in kickstart. FAI https://fai-project.org/ Based on cfengine. Supports also SUSE, but main target is debian. It has also web service ( quite limited ) to generate modified installation image. what is nice that they has users survey publically available. So I see in some of their report that users use it even for SLE, others use autoyast and fai only for debian. would be nice to have similar survey. I would like to play a bit more with FAI, as I see also opportunity to contribute there and help some SUSE/openSUSE users which prefer cfengine. Visibility of autoyast When I am searching for competition I am also interested how autoYaST is visible: Googling "unattended installation" no chance, "unattended installation linux" nothing, "unattended installation suse" shows finally autoyast. "automatic installation" no chance, "automatic installation linux" autoyast is heavily beaten by fai and kickstart, autoyast is on second page at bottom, "automatic instalation suse" is clear win. I hope you find this useful. Josef -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] To contact the owner, e-mail: [email protected]
