FAI.me - A Build Service for Installation and Cloud Images

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 Juri,
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.

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

"Please install those packages from
my publicly available repository."

Let's see.

As we see, this job finished in 74 seconds.

Now, this customised installation image
is available for download.

You can also download the log file.

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

a partial package mirror.

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

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

are available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

by clicking the web interface.

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

and use this configuration space.

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

are now also listed there.

First, create the partial mirror and then
create the installation image.

Ok, copy link location…

Let's see how good the network is here.

[Q] It's a rather large image.

Yeah, because it includes all the packages
and with Xfce, LibreOffice and so on

and the installation environment is maybe
about 200MB.

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

So, 2, 1, done.

I have a little wrapper which calls
a fresh kvm machine

with an empty disk and boots this ISO image

and then we will see how this installation
runs.

So this is dracut booting the image

and now you see there are already
some parted commands executed

and now the packages are installed
and everything runs on

and in the end some customization
script.

We use only shell scripts for doing
some customizations

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

so this is local on the ISO image.

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

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

from the internet but this default
in the FAI service,

we put everything onto the ISO image.

I guess it will run for 4 minutes.

[Q] ???

Yeah.

What I will show you now is…

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

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

for example you can give a root password.

If you leave this empty, sudo will be
configured.

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

that would be Mrfai for me.

With the partitioning schemes, we have
one partition

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

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

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

we have only 4 things that you can choose.

[Q] For encryption?

[A] Yes.

So, this was the partitioning things.

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

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

and then also create an installation image.

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

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

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

and do not have these problems.

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

I can do this with this default.

Let's see, the installation is still running.

So, advanced features.

The next thing after this installation,

I will show you how to create cloud
images.

Currently, we create an installation image,

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

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

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

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

But first, see if the installation finish.

Ah! Ok.

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

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

and so on.

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

but that's not really true.

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

everything went well

and now we just reboot the machine.

You see the grub.

Ok, Xfce desktop.

debian was a user with password FAI.

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

We have only one partition, no LVM

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

Gimp is there, so this is nice.

And the midnight commander is also there.

And now we just throw this machine.
Gone.

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

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

it's so nice and fast.

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

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

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

that you have to download later.

By default, I use zstd compression.

Anyone who dose not know
this compression?

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

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

The disk image is sparse and gzip
cannot handle this

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

and all the other, xz, zstd, can handle
sparse files very nicely.

So, the hostname is set, the root password,
username with a password.

Now we want to install Buster.