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

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First, anybody that never heard anything
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
Debian installer did not have

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the preseeding stuff, so we needed
something automatically.

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

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today in the lightning talks, I talk
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,
can you reinstall it?"

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

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

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

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like the Debian installer, I guess it's
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
about FAI.

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The target group was always advanced
sysadmins

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but I thought maybe it's possible to make
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
most installations.

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The Debian installer is really perfect
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
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
that covers 90 or 95% of the installations

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

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

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3 to 5 questions and I looked at Linux Mint
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
have also things that are asked

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

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For example, the task selection, where you
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
to have something that

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asks everything at the very beginning.

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Then, maybe some tool could create
a customized installation image

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and this installation image should run
then completely unattended

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

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There are 3 things to customize installation
image,

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

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

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

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

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

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So, how can I make FAI usable for
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
in more detail later,

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

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

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and the customization is just by using
the web interface

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

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I hope I covered most important thangs
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
that's the most important thing

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

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but with some additional packages."

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

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the installation image for the stable
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,
he did a great job

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during the first and second day, he added
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
now is just the bare minimum or questions

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and we can toggle it to more advanced
settings.

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

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if you do not enter a password, a password
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
because

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

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

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and hopefully do not make any wrong
mistakes.

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For example, we could select the Stretch
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
to have some Debian developer tools.

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

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Here, you can enter you own packages.


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I will select the desktop.

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

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

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The language, these are just task packages
that are…

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

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the most common languages, and what I do
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
and with local time,

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it's getting more difficult.

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This installation will install the clock
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,
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
take longer,

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

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

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

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and then you just click "Create
the installation image".

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

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

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Down here you see these are the
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
is generated,

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that's what normally the experienced
sysadmins have to create

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

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In the meantime, we have some more
advanced features

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which I will also show you later.

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For example, this very simple installation
just creates one partition

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

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

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

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

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

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receives the public key from your
github account and puts it

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into the root account so you can log in
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
packages, you could also add this and say

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"Please install those packages from
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
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,
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'
and you can also read the log of

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this call of the fai-mirror, where a list
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
and later they are downloaded

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

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

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

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

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So this is the config space that was
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,
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
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
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