6. Plan your installation, and FAI installs your plans

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Before starting your installation, you should spend a lot of time in planning your installation. When you're happy with your installation concept, FAI can do all the boring, repetitive tasks to turn your plans into reality. FAI can't do good installations if your concept is imperfect or lacks some important details. Start planning the installation by answering the following questions:

Will I create a Beowulf cluster, or do I have to install some desktop machines?
What does my LAN topology look like?
Do I have uniform hardware? Will the hardware stay uniform in the future?
Does the hardware need a special kernel?
How should the hosts be named?
How should the local hard disks be partitioned?
Which applications will be run by the users?
Do the users need a queueing system?
What software should be installed?
Which daemons should be started, and what should the configuration for these look like?
Which remote file systems should be mounted?
How should backups be performed?

You also have to think about user accounts, printers, a mail system, cron jobs, graphic cards, dual boot, NIS, NTP, timezone, keyboard layout, exporting and mounting directories via NFS and many other things. So, there's a lot to do before starting an installation. And remember that knowledge is power, and it's up to you to use it. Installation and administration is a process, not a product. FAI can't do things you don't tell it to do.

But you need not start from scratch. Look at all files and scripts in the configuration space. There are a lot of things you can use for your own installation. A good paper called "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure" with more aspects of building an infrastructure is available at http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap