Today, I talk about FAI.me, which is a build for images.
First, anybody that never heard anything about FAI?
Ok
I started this project in 1999.
I'm not sure…
No, I'm sure that during those times, the Debian installer did not have
the preseeding stuff, so we needed something automatically.
I installed the first cluster with FAI and I always do talks on FAI or
today in the lightning talks, I talk a little bit about dracut,
which is used in FAI.
So, what was the motivation.
A neighbour of mine, she came to me with
"My Windows desktop is broken, can you reinstall it?"
And in the end, I installed her Linux, and I was shortly thinking about
"Should I use FAI for installing her desktop with Linux?"
And in the end, I did not use it because FAI is too complicated,
like the Debian installer, I guess it's not really that easy for beginners
because there are a lot of questions
but also FAI is not really for beginners.
So this was the motivation about thinking about FAI.
The target group was always advanced sysadmins
but I thought maybe it's possible to make FAI usable also for people
that are not that advanced sysadmins.
The idea is that an installer should cover most installations.
The Debian installer is really perfect because I think it covers
all different kinds and strange environments
You can do a lot of things, you can configure very strange combination of language,
keyboard layout and so on
but I was thinking about an installer that covers 90 or 95% of the installations
A lot of special cases can be ignored and since the Debian installer has like
more than 20 questions, I thought it would be much nicer if there were only
3 to 5 questions and I looked at Linux Mint and Mageia installers, CentOS installer,
and they all ask much less questions.
In the Debian installer, we sometimes have also things that are asked
during the installation, so not everything is asked at the very beginning.
For example, the task selection, where you select your desktop,
is done after the base installation.
This was also very important, I would like to have something that
asks everything at the very beginning.
Then, maybe some tool could create a customized installation image
and this installation image should run then completely unattended
so you can get yourself a coffee and when you come back, your machine is ready.
There are 3 things to customize installation image,
you just put this image, you do not have to touch anything, and then it's ready.
I thought "Oh yes, this is FAI, maybe FAI can do this."
As I said, FAI is only, or was until now only a tool for experienced sysadmins
and you have to adjust several config files, these are ASCII files
but still you have to touch 5 to 10 config files to make a customization.
So, how can I make FAI usable for beginners?
That's the beginning of FAI.me.
There's a web page, we'll show it in more detail later,
where you can just click some things, and then you get a customized image.
This image can be put onto a CD, DVD or USB stick, just with dd
and the customization is just by using the web interface
so there's no need for you to edit a text file, a config file inside FAI.
I hope I covered most important thangs that you want to adjust
or a little bit customize.
You can add additional packages, I think that's the most important thing
that people say "I want to have the normal Debian installation
but with some additional packages."
And you can select different different distributions, so it's not only
the installation image for the stable release, you can create
3 variants of the installation.
This is the web page and thanks to Yuri, he did a great job
during the first and second day, he added a new feature that we now have
a toggle button.
Is it big enough or should I zoom in?
Ok.
So, we have a toggle button, what you see now is just the bare minimum or questions
and we can toggle it to more advanced settings.
You have to select or just leave this as it is, username,
if you do not enter a password, a password will be generated and shown to you
and sent by e-mail.
I will now just type in the password.
It's here in clear text, for me that's fine because
there's also a comment that you should change the password after the installation
and I do not like to enter passwords twice so you can see what you typed in
and hopefully do not make any wrong mistakes.
For example, we could select the Stretch distribution with backports,
so we will get a 4.15 kernel with Stretch.
There are some buttons we can say we want to have some Debian developer tools.
This is what I defined in the FAI configuration, so just a list of packages.
Here, you can enter you own packages.
I will select the desktop.
You can have an installation without any desktop, so a very small installation.
I will select the XFCE desktop, but all the other desktops are here.
The language, these are just task packages that are…
I think Debian has much more task packages, I just searched which are
the most common languages, and what I do if I say I want the spanish language,
also the keyboard layout is spanish.
I know there are different combinations and with local time,
it's getting more difficult.
This installation will install the clock with UTC, so if you want to set
your time, you have to do this manually.
I want to cover the most common installations.
We select english US, the desktop and, as an example, the midnight commander
and GIMP.
I can add an email address so if it would take longer,
for example if this service will have success and a lot of people are using it,
you may wait for some minutes so your job will be finished.
So here are the comments, how to reconfigure the keyboard or the timezone
and then you just click "Create the installation image".
Now, in the background, there's some job, a script, looking "Oh, there's a new job"
and there's a summary of the configuration, of the web configuration.
Down here you see these are the FAI classes,
I will explain a little bit more about this.
But with this information, FAI configuration is generated,
that's what normally the experienced sysadmins have to create
but here you just click on some buttons and it will be done for you.
In the meantime, we have some more advanced features
which I will also show you later.
For example, this very simple installation just creates one partition
but you can also select that you want to have a separate /home partition
or using lvm just by selecting this on the web interface.
You can also add your SSH public key for logging as root without a password
or what's very nice, I found the new Ubuntu installer does this,
you can give your github account and then there's a comment which
receives the public key from your github account and puts it
into the root account so you can log in without password.
I think that's very neat.