From: Thomas Lange <lange@informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE> To: beowulf@beowulf.org Subject: FAI (Fully automatic installation) 2.0 released ! Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 11:50:43 +0200 (MET DST) After four month of hacking, I'm very happy to release the next major version of FAI before I'm going on vacation. FAI is a non interactive system to install a Debian GNU/Linux operating system on a PC cluster. You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on the whole cluster, without any interaction necessary. Thus it's a scalable method for installing and updating a cluster unattended with little effort involved. FAI uses the Debian distribution and a collection of shell- and Perl-scripts for the installation process. Changes to the configuration files of the operating system are made by cfengine, shell and Perl scripts. Using FAI, an unattended and fully automated installation of a Linux cluster which consists of 16 dual Pentium PC's and a beowulf cluster with 20 1GHz AMD nodes was performed. FAI's target group are system administrators how have to install Debian onto one or even hundreds of computers. Because it's a general purpose installation tool, it can be used for installing a beowulf cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm or a linux laboratory or a classroom. Also large-scale linux networks with different hardware and different installation requirements are easy to establish using FAI. These are some major changes I made: - added fcopy and ftar commands for easy copying files and extracting archives - kernel 2.2.19 support - less cfengine scripts, more shell scripts - FAI is now more portable, tests on SUN Sparc went well - package_config can use dpkg --get-selections format - log file saving via rcp or scp - much better manual - new description of all classes available - new cvs location (now at cvs.debian.org) - the log files of two sample installations with FAI 2.0 are available on the FAI homepage. - beowulf cluster support And a lot of other things changed, so have a look at the changelog file below. Many thanks to all, who gave bug reports, suggestions how to enhance FAI or other feedback. The main change is, that FAI is now an official Debian package. It's available on all Debian mirrors or FAI's homepage: http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai Thomas -- Thomas ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Thomas Lange Institut fuer Informatik mailto:lange@informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE Universitaet zu Koeln Pohligstr. 1 Telefon: +49 221 470 5303 50969 Koeln Fax : +49 221 470 5317 1024D/AB9B66FD AEA6 A8C1 BD8E 67C4 8EF6 8BCA DC13 E54E AB9B 66FD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf