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Today, I talk about FAI.me, which is a[br]build for images.

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First, anybody that never heard anything[br]about FAI?

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Ok

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I started this project in 1999.

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I'm not sure…

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No, I'm sure that during those times, the[br]Debian installer did not have

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the preseeding stuff, so we needed[br]something automatically.

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I installed the first cluster with FAI and[br]I always do talks on FAI or

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today in the lightning talks, I talk[br]a little bit about dracut,

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which is used in FAI.

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So, what was the motivation.

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A neighbour of mine, she came to me with

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"My Windows desktop is broken,[br]can you reinstall it?"

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And in the end, I installed her Linux,[br]and I was shortly thinking about

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"Should I use FAI for installing her[br]desktop with Linux?"

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And in the end, I did not use it because[br]FAI is too complicated,

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like the Debian installer, I guess it's[br]not really that easy for beginners

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because there are a lot of questions

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but also FAI is not really for beginners.

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So this was the motivation about thinking[br]about FAI.

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The target group was always advanced[br]sysadmins

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but I thought maybe it's possible to make[br]FAI usable also for people

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that are not that advanced sysadmins.

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The idea is that an installer should cover[br]most installations.

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The Debian installer is really perfect[br]because I think it covers

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all different kinds and strange environments

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You can do a lot of things, you can configure[br]very strange combination of language,

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keyboard layout and so on

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but I was thinking about an installer[br]that covers 90 or 95% of the installations

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A lot of special cases can be ignored and[br]since the Debian installer has like

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more than 20 questions, I thought it would[br]be much nicer if there were only

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3 to 5 questions and I looked at Linux Mint[br]and Mageia installers, CentOS installer,

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and they all ask much less questions.

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In the Debian installer, we sometimes[br]have also things that are asked

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during the installation, so not everything[br]is asked at the very beginning.

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For example, the task selection, where you[br]select your desktop,

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is done after the base installation.

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This was also very important, I would like[br]to have something that

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asks everything at the very beginning.

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Then, maybe some tool could create[br]a customized installation image

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and this installation image should run[br]then completely unattended

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so you can get yourself a coffee and[br]when you come back, your machine is ready.

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There are 3 things to customize installation[br]image,

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you just put this image, you do not have[br]to touch anything, and then it's ready.

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I thought "Oh yes, this is FAI, maybe[br]FAI can do this."

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As I said, FAI is only, or was until now[br]only a tool for experienced sysadmins

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and you have to adjust several config[br]files, these are ASCII files

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but still you have to touch 5 to 10[br]config files to make a customization.

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So, how can I make FAI usable for[br]beginners?

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That's the beginning of FAI.me.

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There's a web page, we'll show it[br]in more detail later,

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where you can just click some things, and[br]then you get a customized image.

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This image can be put onto a CD, DVD or[br]USB stick, just with dd

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and the customization is just by using[br]the web interface

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so there's no need for you to edit[br]a text file, a config file inside FAI.

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I hope I covered most important thangs[br]that you want to adjust

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or a little bit customize.

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You can add additional packages, I think[br]that's the most important thing

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that people say "I want to have the normal[br]Debian installation

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but with some additional packages."

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And you can select different different[br]distributions, so it's not only

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the installation image for the stable[br]release, you can create

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3 variants of the installation.

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This is the web page and thanks to Juri,[br]he did a great job

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during the first and second day, he added[br]a new feature that we now have

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a toggle button.

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Is it big enough or should I zoom in?

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Ok.

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So, we have a toggle button, what you see[br]now is just the bare minimum or questions

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and we can toggle it to more advanced[br]settings.

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You have to select or just leave this as[br]it is, username,

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if you do not enter a password, a password[br]will be generated and shown to you

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and sent by e-mail.

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I will now just type in the password.

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It's here in clear text, for me that's fine[br]because

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there's also a comment that you should[br]change the password after the installation

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and I do not like to enter passwords twice[br]so you can see what you typed in

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and hopefully do not make any wrong[br]mistakes.

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For example, we could select the Stretch[br]distribution with backports,

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so we will get a 4.15 kernel with Stretch.

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There are some buttons we can say we want[br]to have some Debian developer tools.

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This is what I defined in the FAI[br]configuration, so just a list of packages.

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Here, you can enter you own packages.[br]

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I will select the desktop.

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You can have an installation without any[br]desktop, so a very small installation.

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I will select the XFCE desktop, but all[br]the other desktops are here.

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The language, these are just task packages[br]that are…

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I think Debian has much more task packages,[br]I just searched which are

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the most common languages, and what I do[br]if I say I want the spanish language,

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also the keyboard layout is spanish.

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I know there are different combinations[br]and with local time,

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it's getting more difficult.

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This installation will install the clock[br]with UTC, so if you want to set

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your time, you have to do this manually.

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I want to cover the most common installations.

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We select english US, the desktop and,[br]as an example, the midnight commander

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and GIMP.

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I can add an email address so if it would[br]take longer,

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for example if this service will have[br]success and a lot of people are using it,

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you may wait for some minutes so your job[br]will be finished.

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So here are the comments, how to reconfigure[br]the keyboard or the timezone

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and then you just click "Create[br]the installation image".

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Now, in the background, there's some job,[br]a script, looking "Oh, there's a new job"

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and there's a summary of the configuration,[br]of the web configuration.

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Down here you see these are the[br]FAI classes,

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I will explain a little bit more about this.

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But with this information, FAI configuration[br]is generated,

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that's what normally the experienced[br]sysadmins have to create

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but here you just click on some buttons[br]and it will be done for you.

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In the meantime, we have some more[br]advanced features

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which I will also show you later.

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For example, this very simple installation[br]just creates one partition

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but you can also select that you want[br]to have a separate /home partition

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or using lvm just by selecting this[br]on the web interface.

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You can also add your SSH public key[br]for logging as root without a password

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or what's very nice, I found the new[br]Ubuntu installer does this,

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you can give your github account and[br]then there's a comment which

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receives the public key from your[br]github account and puts it

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into the root account so you can log in[br]without password.

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I think that's very neat.

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And if you have a repository with your own[br]packages, you could also add this and say

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"Please install those packages from[br]my publicly available repository."

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Let's see.

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As we see, this job finished in 74 seconds.

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Now, this customised installation image[br]is available for download.

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You can also download the log file.

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Since this is an installation image,[br]I first have to create

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a partial package mirror.

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This is done by the command 'fai-mirror'[br]and you can also read the log of

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this call of the fai-mirror, where a list[br]of all you packages with all the dependencies

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are available.

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So you see, these are the list of packages[br]and later they are downloaded

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and in the end, it says it created a mirror[br]of 1G of packages

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and since I have a local mirror,[br]it's very fast.

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This is the one part on the installation[br]image partial mirror with all the packages

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and the other is that the config space[br]which you can also download.

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So this is the config space that was[br]really created for you

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by clicking the web interface.

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If you want to do more things with FAI,[br]you can set up your own FAI server

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and use this configuration space.

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And, that's also very new, the two commands[br]that are used for creating this ISO image

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are now also listed there.

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First, create the partial mirror and then[br]create the installation image.

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Ok, copy link location…

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Let's see how good the network is here.

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[Q] It's a rather large image.

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Yeah, because it includes all the packages