Custom Distro

[Paul Lussier]

"Joshua D. Abraham" <jabra at ccs.neu.edu> writes:

>  FAI was a horrible thing to maintain because of the changes that
>  needed to be made in updating for each new kernel version

It's not really that bad, at least with more recent versions.  We've
got good revision control and a few help scripts wrapped around that.
Really, unless you're install kernel needs to be updated to handle new
hardware, you shouldn't need to change it very often, and having FAI
install a completely different kernel which does completely support
the target hardware is trivial, as is changing/updating which kernel
gets installed.

> and the lack of good documentation by Thomas Lang.

Well, the documentation is an issue.  It's not that it's bad, but that
the writer is a) an engineer, a breed notorious for poor documentation
skills, b) not a native english speaker.  The real documentation for
FAI is in the code, which unfortunately, is not well commented either.
Fortunately, it's almost completely bash or perl.

>  I for one, think FAI is a good idea but bad implementation. 

It's immature, but all great ideas start out immature and evolve.  FAI
is IMO, is the best out there currently for Debian.  And it certainly
beats anything RH has come up with in the KickStart area.  FAI is
almost a direct rip-off of Solaris' Jumpstart, but from what I
remember, far more flexible.

I've been using FAI for over 4 years now.  I've seen it do nothing but
improve.  I currently manage a 350+ server farm with it of very
disparate hardware and a variety of different software
configurations..  I have yet come up with anything I can't get FAI to
do.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul