Development plan
From FAIWiki
features under development:
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fai-multi-distribution
This is about installing other distributions than Debian, also non-dpkg-based ones, with FAI. An own page is now dedicated to this, to document how this is done in some experimental versions of FAI and additional packages, see FAI multi-distribution.
Development information still is here. The goal is to enable FAI to install other Linux distributions than Debian GNU/Linux - we want FAI to be able to install at least ubuntu, debian, progeny, redhat, fedora, mandriva, plus other Linux distributions in an easy and nicely integrated way. For now, with the debian package, you install debian systems, with my ubuntu patches you install ubuntu - other debian based, debootstrappable systems are possible, but until now I didn't come up with a good solution to do them alltogether next to each other from one server. This would ease integration of my patches with debian upstream, too.
status
- the most important things to enable other distributions (other debian-based ones, mandriva, yum-based ones, yast-based ones) is included in mainstream FAI, but we are missing example configs as well as well as some more testing and docs. for the docs see [Etch-doc-todo]
- Documentation how to install SLES 9 with FAI when using a Yum repository.
people working on this
- Henning Sprang - created a version of FAI that is able to install Ubuntu, Linux 5.04 with FAI, from a Debian installserver
The further plan for this is
- make the available implementation nicer and cleaner
- add examples for some other distributions:
- centos
- suse ( a lot of people would use this)
- gentoo ( nobody really wants to do this!)
- write the script /usr/sbin/build-fai-base-image, which calls /usr/lib/fai-distributions/<DISTRIBUTION>/make-base-tgz when called with the argument DISTRIBUTION
- in http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/fai/people/lazyboy/fai-distributions exists an implementation ofthis, just only for debian-based distributions as of yet.
- there are possibilities to bootstrap fedora and suse with yum
- solve grub menu.lst creation problem for mandriva (not so important currently, mandriva support is outdated)
infosources
- bootstrapping links:
- try this: http://thomas.apestaart.org/projects/mach/
- or this: redhat ABE: http://people.redhat.com/mwaite/
- also for xen, there exist some sites thta offer base packages for multiple distributions: http://www.xen-get.org/ http://jailtime.org/start
- this also looks promising: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/rpmbased-dist-chroot.html
- another page on bootsrapping different distributions: http://wiki.sisuite.org/BuildingLinuxChroots#head-9f88a600ba5674440fe6303b906294af4d1958f5
- gentoo botstrap: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/QEMUGentoo
- http://www.linux-magazin.de/Artikel/ausgabe/2003/01/054_vserver/vserver.html in this article they say, the vserver package has tools to bootstrap various distributions - need to look at it
- centos 3 mirror: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/
- mandriva chroot howto: http://qa.mandrivalinux.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/ChrootHowTo
- freeoszoo also provides ready made images for some operating systems, not sure if they are usable for automatic installs, they seem to be quite big and might contain full-blown (Desktop?)installations. anyway, the are there: http://free.oszoo.org/download.html
- some more basic system images meant for xen (here's some suse, also) http://ftp.ooofr.org/~anivard/VMhosts/
- and one more documentation to build basic file systems for other distributions: http://sole.infis.univ.ts.it/~chri/hopeless.html ( see 6. Root File System)
- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock
fai gui
creating a nice GUI Frontend for managing, querying and manipulating, the FAI configuration directory
- see GUIConcept for some ideas about this. Apart from being a Web-based GUI, this can and shuld also solve as a remote control API so FAI can be integrated into other Infrastructure management Tools. E.G. the GoSA developers would welcome to be able to just work against an API instead of having to manage the FAI config and abstraction themselves.
status
This is just a concept as of yet. Needs to be implemented
people working on this
- Richard Wonka / Sanso - reviewed lazyboy's first draft of a concept
- lazyboy - Henning Sprang wrote some notes about requirements and a first ideas for a FAI GUI
alternatives
- GOsa now includes a FAI plugin, so you can edit all FAI data within GOsa. This is currently tested in the Limux project in the city of munich.
- I tried to get started with GoSA. Though it looks quite nice, and it is certainly desirable to have such an admin interface when you have ldap servers to administrate, it's dependency for LDAP makes it really hard to get started. I would not like to recommend GoSA as the default GUI for FAI - I want to have an easiert to install GUI with less dependencies on other compley software.(lazyb0y)
configspace redesign
status
Only a concept exists currently
people working on this
User:Lazyboy lazyb0y wrote the concept and discussed it on fai-devel with others
Command Remapping
It would help tab completion and working on the command line in general if we could rename all fai commands to start with "fai-". Furthermore there are misleading command names which could have better names.
Here is a list of commands and possible alternative names:
| Current Command Name | Possibly Better Name |
|---|---|
| /usr/bin/fai-mirror | /usr/bin/fai-build-mirror |
| /usr/sbin/make-fai-nfsroot | /usr/sbin/fai-make-nfsroot |
| /usr/sbin/make-fai-bootfloppy | /usr/sbin/fai-make-bootfloppy |
| /usr/sbin/faimond | /usr/sbin/fai-monitord |
| /usr/sbin/fai-chboot | /usr/sbin/fai-configure-pxe |
| /usr/sbin/fai-cd | /usr/sbin/fai-make-cd |
| /sbin/fai-start-stop-daemon | /sbin/fai-start-stop-daemon |
| /usr/bin/device2grub | /usr/bin/fai-device2grub |
| /usr/bin/fai-debconf | /usr/bin/fai-debconf |
| /usr/bin/fai-class | /usr/bin/fai-class |
| /usr/bin/ainsl | /usr/bin/fai-append |
| /usr/bin/fai | /usr/bin/fai-exec |
| /usr/sbin/fcopy | /usr/sbin/fai-copy |
| /usr/sbin/install_packages | /usr/sbin/fai-install-packages |
| /usr/sbin/ftar | /usr/sbin/fai-tar |
| /usr/sbin/setup_harddisks | /usr/sbin/fai-setup-harddisks |
other ideas
- An approach using template toolkit in FAI
- use dirinstall from an rescue partition for recovery
- ???
