[ previous ] [ Contents ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ next ]

FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)
Chapter 9 - FAI on other architectures and distributions

If you want to use FAI on other architectures than i386 you might need to take care of some things yourself. These are things that may have to be changed on other architectures:

make-nfsroot.conf: FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS must be adopted to the architecture you're using.

task partition:: Currently setup_harddisks needs the command sfdisk(8). If this is not available then write a short shell script which uses parted(8), to partition the disks and for creating the file fstab. Alternatively you can use a hook (see Hooks, Section 7.11) to format and mount your partitions.

Boot loader:: There are scripts for setting up lilo(8) and grub(8). Here you may add support for your specific boot loader.

If you want to serve multiple nfsroot directories on one FAI server, you need to create specific config directories in /etc for fai, like /etc/fai-sarge and /etc/fai-etch. Then you need to set the NFSROOT variables to different directories and run make-fai-nfsroot -c /etc/fai-sarge.

9.1 FAI on AMD64

No problems. Have a look at www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download/amd64/

9.2 FAI on PowerPC

There's some stuff on www.layer-acht.org/fai. Most notably there are hooks for partitioning and config-files to setup bootloaders for oldworld and newworld.

9.3 FAI on IA64

There's one big IA64 Beowulf cluster running which was installed with FAI. Only the partitioning part has to be replaced by a short script, since sfdisk is not available on IA64.

9.4 FAI on Alpha

There is a Mini-HowTo available at www.aei.mpg.de/~stefgru/fai/

9.5 FAI for Suse, Redhat and Gentoo

Many people are interested in FAI for other (mostly RPM based) Linux distributions. I made some research and it should not be much work to implement it. But I need more help to implement it. If you are interested and would like to help me, please send an email to fai@informatik.uni-koeln.de.

9.6 FAI on SUN SPARC hardware running Linux

Although FAI is architecture independent, there are some packages which are only available for certain architectures (e.g. silo, sparc-utils). SUN SPARC computers can boot from their boot prompt and don't need a boot floppy. To boot a SUN use:

     boot net:dhcp - ip=::::::dhcp

You have to convert the kernel image from ELF format to a.out format. Use the program elftoaout (mentioned in the FAQ). The symlink to the kernel image to be booted is not the host name. Look at the FAQ at www.ultralinux.org for more information and www.sparc-boot.org/. . A success report is available at www.opossum.ch/fai/ and a HOWTO and a lot of examples can be found at toolbox.rutgers.edu/~amurphy/fai.

9.7 FAI for Solaris

FAI has also been ported for use with SUN Solaris OS installations in cooperation with Solaris jumpstart. Get the FAI sources and change to the sunos directory. There you can call make which creates the tarball /tmp/fai-solaris.tar.gz. You have to read the file README.sunos and have some knowledge about Solaris jumpstart.

The file format of the configuration files in disk_config and package_config are different than those for Linux.