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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
and with Xfce, LibreOffice and so on

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and the installation environment is maybe
about 200MB.

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That's not much bigger than the Debian
installer that you need to download.

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So, 2, 1, done.

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I have a little wrapper which calls
a fresh kvm machine

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with an empty disk and boots this ISO image

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and then we will see how this installation
runs.

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So this is dracut booting the image

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and now you see there are already
some parted commands executed

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and now the packages are installed
and everything runs on

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and in the end some customization
script.

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We use only shell scripts for doing
some customizations

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and you see the files are downloaded
from /media/mirror

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so this is local on the ISO image.

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It would also be possible to create
an image without the packages

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and then give another sources.list file
so the packages would be downloaded

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from the internet but this default
in the FAI service,

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we put everything onto the ISO image.

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I guess it will run for 4 minutes.

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[Q] ???

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Yeah.

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What I will show you now is…

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So, this was the simple one, now I toggle
this web page and

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you will see that there are some more
questions you may answer,

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for example you can give a root password.

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If you leave this empty, sudo will be
configured.

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Here you can upload the SSH key or give
you Github account,

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that would be Mrfai for me.

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With the partitioning schemes, we have
one partition

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or one partition and /home separated
or these two versions with LVM.

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FAI itself can do much more, we could do
soft raid set ups, cryptsetup

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but here I want to cover the most common
installation, so very simple

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we have only 4 things that you can choose.

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[Q] For encryption?

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[A] Yes.

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So, this was the partitioning things.

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This is the new feature where you can add
an URL for your local package repository

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and the rest is the same, you can add
packages you like, your email address

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and then also create an installation image.

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I normally set by default, I include
the nonfree linux firmware.

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This is because my target audience is
an end user and I want to make it

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very comfortable for them, so yeah,
they can just install it

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and do not have these problems.

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And since this is not on an officiel
debian.org web site,

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I can do this with this default.

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Let's see, the installation is still running.

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So, advanced features.

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The next thing after this installation,

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I will show you how to create cloud
images.

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Currently, we create an installation image,

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when you boot it, the installation is run
fully automatically.

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The other type of service FAI.me gives
to you is that it creates a raw image

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or some other formats as you see here,
qcow2 and whatever

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which you can just boot and
the installation is already done.

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But first, see if the installation finish.

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Ah! Ok.

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These are now the shell scripts that are
executed for the customization

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of like /etc/messages of today,
/etc/network/interfaces is written

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and so on.

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You see the installation took 236s, it says
there are some errors

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but that's not really true.

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And it stops here, but we can also
disable this, this is only for showing

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everything went well

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and now we just reboot the machine.

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You see the grub.

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Ok, Xfce desktop.

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debian was a user with password FAI.

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We have "uname -a", this is 4.16,
the backports kernel was installed there.

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We have only one partition, no LVM

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and I told it to install gimp which is
not installed by default.

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Gimp is there, so this is nice.

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And the midnight commander is also there.

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And now we just throw this machine.
Gone.

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What's very nice with this wrapper script,
it creates the local disk

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of the virtual machine in /tmp which is
a RAM disk and I love RAM,

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it's so nice and fast.

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So, this was installation image and now we
look at the cloud image.

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First, you can say how big should your
disk image be.

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Here, I say 8GB, you will see it's not
an 8GB image

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that you have to download later.

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By default, I use zstd compression.

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Anyone who dose not know
this compression?

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This is very fast, very new, created
by Facebook if I'm correct.

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It's for very big files and what you should
never use is gzip with sparse images.

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The disk image is sparse and gzip
cannot handle this

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so if you compress it and uncompress it
it will be very large

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99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and all the other, xz, zstd, can handle
sparse files very nicely.

234
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
So, the hostname is set, the root password,
username with a password.

235
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Now we want to install Buster.