Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:43:26 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 441 computers
- 124 Debian 3.0/3.1 servers (87 regular server, 37 servers based on Xen).
- 290 workstations at 19 classrooms in 6 locations with dualboot (Linux+WinXP)
- 18 kiosks based on firefox
- 9 nodes at one cluster
Which version of fai are you using? We use 3 servers for FAI:
- 2x FAI server with 2.8.4 version of FAI (use 32bit and 64bit NFSROOT)
- 1x debian mirror (NFS gateway to AFS), no FAI package
Which version of fai-kernels are you using as your install kernel?
custom build kernel 2.6 and 2.6 with XEN patches,
all kernels are with openafs-modules package
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai?
- desktops (with gnome, openoffice, burning, browsers, java, matlab, ...)
- clusters (with openpbs)
- servers for openafs, camera, web, ldap, database, aplication, shell,
nocat, gateway/firewall, print, monitoring, ...
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy: No, only for reinstalation
via network card: for workstation in public schoolrooms
type of network card: 3c509, tg3
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE and DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? Centre for Information Technology,
Laboratory for Computer Science, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
Additional comments:
87 regular servers (AFS, DB, print, accounting, vpn, freeradius, gateways, etc.)
37 virtual servers based on Xen (FAI, print, wiki, freeradius, testing, etc.)
FAI infrastructure:
- workstation using PXE boot and sending FAI logs via email
- 2 FAI servers with NFSroot (every has 32bit + 64bit AMD nfsroot) with
AFS-NFS gateway for $FAI
- 1 NFS-AFS gateway (mirror mounting)
- mirror + $FAI at AFS
- 3 administrators (one is student), using CVS
Plan for next year:
- append 4 new classroom (about 60 computers)
- conversion some clusters at META Centrum (meta.cesnet.cz) from systemimager to FAI
Documentation about FAI instalation at University of West Bohemia. It's only in Czech language.
Do you have some nice pictures of your installation? Public lab Yet another FAIwork Big pics
From: Hans-J. Ullrich, hans. ullrich æd loop.de
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:30:20 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 3
Which version of fai are you using? 3.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Mailserver, webserver, desktop, notebook
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
using FAI-CD:yes
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? no
Which drivers are missing? graphics card "I810"
Do you manage your configuration space under version control? no
What is the business of your company/organisation?
IT-Consultance (this is my private) and government (this is where I am working)
From: anonymous
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 10:20:54 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? About a half dozen, but with many, many reinstalls.
Once every ten minutes is no exception since I'm debugging scripted installs at the moment.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.6 kernel
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? All kinds of server and desktop.
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy: Never.
via network card: Yes.
type of network card: TG3 driver works on it. I don'ask.
using FAI-CD: One machine too old and stupid to PXE-boot.
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: Yes. Most common method.
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? No. Our HP workstations had a network card that wouldn't
play nice with the 2.4 kernel provided.
Which drivers are missing? eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95751) rev 4001 PHY(5750)]
Do you manage your configuration space under version control? Not the FAI one
How big is your config space (Mbytes, # of files)? 236M, including nfsroot, 17273 files, again including nfsroot
How many files do you have in ../fai/files? Just a few custom files. 13 files in total.
What is the business of your company/organisation? n/a
Additional comments:
FAI is mainly used in our test/development network, where we often
have to re-install servers for a variety of tasks. I keep all the
servers FAI'ed up, and modify the DHCP server to give the machine a
boot file when I want to reinstall it. I've modified fai-monitor to
look for "installation complete" events and reconfigure the DHCP
server before the machine reboots.
I'm using FAI mainly as a super-powered reset button. Once I have the
system up and running and SSH-able, I use my own scripts to customise
the machine. The idea is to create an environment where I can build
whatever server the situation requires, whenever I want.
One of the things I would be very interested in is to port the FAI
installation resources to one of our AIX machines. That way, I can
install both AIX machines and Debian boxen from the same AIX
server.
From: Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing, info %ad% tchpc.tcd.ie
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:10:55 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 356 opterons, 80 xeons
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6 on the opterons,
fai-kernels 1.9.1sarge2 on the xeons
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? cluster compute nodes
How do you boot your hosts?
via network card: yes
type of network card: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 03)
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: we used this to boot the nodes
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes for the Xeon cluster of IBM x335.
Which drivers are missing?
for the Opteron cluster of IBM e326's, the missing drivers and "parts" were
- the SATA controller driver for
SiI 3512 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 01)
- 32bit compatibility layers for running 32bit, grub failed to
install initially because of this.
And obviously a year ago the OpenIB stack wasnt ready for use and wasn't
available in the debianised kernels in sarge. (this is needed for our
Infiniband HCA's to function)
How big is your config space (Mbytes, # of files)? 4.1M, 2777
How many files do you have in ../fai/files? 559
What is the business of your company/organisation? mainly an academic research/support unit
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing, The University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin.
Additional comments:
The IITAC cluster went into the top500 list in Nov. 2005 at 226th in the list.
More information and some pictures on the two clusters IITAC and moloch.
I'm answering this questionaire based on what we had available to us in
terms of software ~14-16 months ago.
We've used FAI to primarily bootstrap compute nodes, but we're slowly adding
to our FAI install so that we can bring up full nodes quickly if a node ever
has a hdd failure.
From: Adrian von Bidder, avbidder [äd] fortytwo.ch
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:06:37 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 80
Which version of fai are you using? 2.10
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build 2.6.15
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops, plus one NX terminalserver
(which is basically the desktop plus a few packages.)
How do you boot your hosts? For Install: net, PXE boot.
Some hosts are on WLAN which won't boot, so these are put to cable
in a different room for installation.
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? No, IIRC
the main issue was SATA. Not sure, has been some time.
Do you manage your configuration space under version control? Subversion, yes.
How big is your config space (Mbytes, # of files)? 5M, 154 files
How many files do you have in ../fai/files? 196
What is the business of your company/organisation? IT consulting company, OPIT Solutions AG
Additional comments:
Setup late during sarge lifetime, but too early for etch (particularly: fai
was not ready yet) - so we install from a sarge nfsroot, but
use "everything" (= KDE, oo.org, X, cups, udev, ...) from etch. Yay! for
Debian's package management / dependency handling.
This installation was done for a customer. It's Stiftung Bühl, Wädenswil
They are a children's home for children and young adults with learning disabilities.
From: Carl Caum, carl ä_d cs.mtsu.edu
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:05:21 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 25
Which version of fai are you using? 2.10.1 (ubuntu)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.6.15.6 from fai-kernels 1.10.3 (ubuntu)
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops, cluster nodes, various servers
How do you boot your hosts? DHCP, PXE, TFTP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing? none
Do you manage your configuration space under version control? no, but I probably should start
How big is your config space (Mbytes, # of files)? 382 MB, 664 files
How many files do you have in ../fai/files? 463
What is the business of your company/organisation? Middle Tennessee State University, Computer Science Department
Additional comments:
To deploy and auto update Ubuntu and Debian systems through our department. Although FAI has
saved us time and time again, udev continuously presents problems. I ended up having to give a
hack of a workaround like this:
#### .../fai/hooks/configure.DEFAULT ####
if [ -x $target/etc/init.d/udev ]; then
chroot $target /etc/init.d/udev stop
chroot $target /usr/bin/dpkg --configure --pending
chroot $target /etc/init.d/udev start
fi
Recentently we ran into a problem with hal and udev. I had to create special udev rules because
we didn't want to add all of our users to the cdrom, plugdev, etc groups in LDAP. So I made udev
create all the devices with the users group. Hal ended up having to be added to the users group to
work properly.
Also, we ran into a situation where we have a networking lab with a master node that has a single
connection to the outside world and all other machines were on a private network connected
to the master node. So I ended up creating a FAI installation that installs an FAI server that all
other networking lab machines can install off of. That was fun :) That's also why my .../fai/files
is so large.
From: Andreas Sindermann, sinder äd thp.Uni-Koeln.DE
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 12:12:03 +0200 (MEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~50
Which version of fai are you using? 2.10.1ubuntu1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6, kernel from
fai-kernels 1.10.3ubuntu2 with forcedeth network driver added
How do you boot your hosts?
via network card: X
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE/DHCP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? no
Which drivers are missing? forcedeth driver is missing in Ubuntu 6.06 version of fai-kernels
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops
Do you manage your configuration space under version control? no
How big is your config space (Mbytes, # of files)? 38MB, 116 files
How many files do you have in ../fai/files? 76
What is the business of your company/organisation? Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne
From: Russel Hill; russh347 xadx gmail.com
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2006 09:23:16 -0700
How many hosts have you installed using fai? a few hundred, unless you
count each installation on our test station (several hundred by itself)
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.3 plus fai-bootcd 0.3.4
We are now in the process of updating to the latest fai (in debian testing)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom built 2.4, derived from from fai-kernels 1.8
(soon to be the standard 2.6 FAI kernel)
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Rack mount servers, in pairs. I'd also like to use FAI on our development boxes.
How do you boot your hosts? Using fai-bootcd, soon to be fai-cd.
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
The 2.4 kernel didn't meet the requirements for fai-bootcd so we
recompiled to include those. The 2.6 kernel seems to have everything we need.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Key Technology. We manufacture and sell food processing equipment
(mostly sorters and conveyors).
Additional comments:
We use FAI to install and update software on production machines both
on our production floor and in the field. FAI makes the software
installation fast and easy for our production and field service
personnel. It also makes handling service calls easy because we KNOW
what's installed.
Our build servers automatically detect when source files have changed.
They build, test, and package the various software components. One
build server is dedicated to detecting new packages and automatically
building an fai-bootcd ISO.
Picture of our machines.
The pair of linux boxes on which we use FAI are just above the
UPS. The lower one runs our UI while the upper one does real-time
processing. The remainder of the 1U rack mount boxes house custom
boards with embedded processors for real-time image processing. The
embedded processors also run uClinux.
From: Rudy Gevaert; Rudy.Gevaert _ta_ UGent.be
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:55:54 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? up to today 43
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4, but now migrating to 2.10.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom built 2.4 and 2.6 kernels
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai?
xen virtual and host servers, mail servers, imap servers, general
purpose servers, file servers, vpn servers, ...
How do you boot your hosts? dhcp + pxe
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? no
Which drivers are missing? mpt* drivers, megaraid drivers, ipmi
What is the business of your company/organisation? University of Ghent
Additional comments:
Hardware are almost all dell poweredges (1750,1800,1850, 1855), we
also have a dell blade system. I'm trying to install a Sun X4100
with FAI right now. This is 64 bit.
From: Peter Ackermann; packermann=et=thomas-krenn.com
Date: Mon, 08 May 2006 11:13:33 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 500 Servers per month
Which version of fai are you using? 2.9.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6.16
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Servers and some desktops
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
using FAI-CD:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: X
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing? Depends on the Server, mostly block device drivers for
RAID-Controllers (ARECA, some Intel, LSI), networkcards (Marvel Yukon 2 e.x.)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Server Distribution, www.thomas-krenn.com
Additional comments:
We use FAI to install all of our servers for quality checking. As we
use a costum kernel that supports all of our hardware, we can see
imediatly, if there is a hardwarefault.
From: Jan Jansen, jan.jansen =a=t uni-dortmund.de
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 10:40:52 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 8
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom build kernel 2.6.8
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Mail/DNS/Ldap Server, DB+Terminal Server, Network Clients with different cfgs
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy: often
via network card: more often
type of network card: intel e100/e1000
using FAI-CD: not yet
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: DHCP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing? No missing, but wrong choose of ethernet
driver, Raid Drvs
What is the business of your company/organisation? Producer of industrial embedded hardware (cpci), EKF Elektronik &- Messtechnik GmbH
From: Sebastian Broekhoven s.broekhoven _A_d networking4all.com
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:00:43 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? At this moment about 15 hosts. But there will be more.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel-image-2.6-686
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? All kind of hosting-servers. Database, DNS, Email, Web.
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy: None
via network card: None
type of network card: None
using FAI-CD: Some servers.
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: All our hosts boots this way
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing? None at this moment.
What is the business of your company/organisation? webhosting company in the Netherlands, Networking4all bv
Additional comments:
All our old Redhad and Fedora installations will be migrated to Debian
Sarge with FAI. We are using FAI to install and update our servers
remotely. FAI provides us a base installation.
From: Sebastian Schmitzdorff
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:26:57 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 200+
Which version of fai are you using? 2.10
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Hosting Server and Root Server
How do you boot your hosts? PXE, DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? easynet GmbH is a hosting company that provides
customized datacentre/hosting/network solutions for business and enterprise customers.
From: IT Support Mathematical Institute, support =ad_ math.uni-bonn.de
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:34:29 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~80-90
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4 (patched)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.6.8-2-k7/AMD64
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Desktops
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card: 3c905C-TX/TX-M, Yukon Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T, ...
using FAI-CD:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE/DHCP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing? Only vfat that makes trouble with USB
sticks if you're not root. We are preloading it now via /etc/modules
What is the business of your company/organisation? Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn
Additional comments:
We're using FAI to maintain the large amount of Debian workstations
here. We have a large number of different hardware configurations. FAI
does the job very well to handle these in a easy way. Before we used FAI
we had to do the boring installation via Debian installer each time we
installed a workstation. Transfer of common configurations was made via
cfengine and a small script. (Cfengine in woody and the backport was
horrible, the cfengine daemon often died and took 100% of the CPU until
we finally killed him)
The installation of Sarge via FAI was remarkably fast. Compared to the
several weeks for the switch from SuSE to Debian Woody (by hand), we
only needed several days to update the workstations to sarge (it took
several days because of organizational problems)
From: Marco Jankowski, Marco.Jankowski aatt bfr.bund.de
Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2006 08:58:38 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~30
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.8 and custom build kernel 2.4
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Web-Server, Application-Server, Desktops, Notebooks
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy: Actually from floppy with static ip
type of network card: pcnet32 e1000 tg3
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing? megaide(LSI)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Federal Institute for Risk Assessment
(BfR) is the scientific body of the Federal Republic of Germany that
prepares expert reports and opinions on questions of food safety and
consumer health protection on the basis of internationally recognised
scientific assessment criteria.
From: Guy Coates, gmpc =a_t sanger.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 09:41:19 +0100 (BST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? More than 540 in several clusters and for different servers
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? We use a custom 2.6 kernel.
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? compute farm, web servers and other miscellaneous servers
How do you boot your hosts? Via the network card (broadcom gigabit / tg3 cards)
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing? Some SAS drivers are missing from the stock sarge kernel.
What is the business of your company/organisation? The Sanger Institute is a genome research institute primarily funded by
the Wellcome Trust. Our purpose is to further the knowledge of genomes,
particularly through large scale sequencing and analysis. Read this article.
Additional comments:
Main compute cluster
--------------------
168 IBM HS20 Blades (2x2.8 Ghz PIV, 32 bit OS) (picture)
280 IBM HS20 Blades (2x3.2 Ghz EMT64, 64bit OS)
Trace searchengine cluster
--------------------------
48 IBM LS20 Blades (2x2.4 Ghz Opteron, 64bit OS)
Web servers
-----------
28 IBM HS20 blades (2x2.8 Ghz PIV, 32bit OS)
Misc servers
-------------
20 HP DL585 / 385 servers (various 2 or 4 CPU dual core Opteron, 64bit OS)
Our deployed software stack is 725MB. Installation time on an LS20 blade
is 153 seconds. (Machines have scsi disks, and we have a local debian mirror)
As well as using FAI to install the OS, we also use FAI to "pre-install"
the machines. The "Pre-installation" stage flashes and configures the
BIOS and configures hardware raid controllers.
We run two fai servers, one for installing x86 machines, and one for installing
AMD64 machines. (I suspect that we should be able to consolidate onto one FAI server,
as /usr/local/share/fai is also identical on the AMD64 and x86 servers).
17 Mar 2004: We've used numerous automatic installers (IBM csm, RLX control tower, redhat
kickstart), and FAI is the fastest and the most flexible.
From: Bertrand Rétif, contact aatt phosphore-si.com
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 09:57:12 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Around 15
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? File server, mail server, desktops
How do you boot your hosts? via network card, PXE boot and DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? I just
create my company that provide computer services to small companies. I currently working alone.
Phosphore SI - http://www.phosphore-si.com
Additional comments:
I use FAI to automate the installation of servers and destops I installed
under Linux. I keep the configuration of servers under subversion,
then I am able to reinstall quickly a host thanks to FAI and subversion.
From: Juraj Holtak, juraj aadd proaut.org
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 13:20:01 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 50 to 70
Which version of fai are you using? started with 2.5.x and are using 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build 2.4 kernel
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? destops
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card:
using FAI-CD: X
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE and DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? IT Service Provider, SCHWAAR.COM, ProAut s.r.o.
From: Mamadou Sow, Mamadou.Sow aXt lipn.univ-paris13.fr
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:49:15 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 5
Which version of fai are you using? 2.9.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.6.15 from fai-kernels 1.10.2
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: *
type of network card:
using FAI-CD:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: *
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Computer Science lab of the Paris 13 University (L.I.P.N.)
Additional comments:
In first time I'm doing some test.
From: Chris Allen chrisa xatx matrixscience.com
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:54:11 +0000
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 14 blades in an IBM Bladecenter HS20
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.6 FAI kernel
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Mascot server cluster nodes
How do you boot your hosts? PXE using on-board Broadcom Gigabit NICs
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? The 2.6 kernel seems to work.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Matrix Science - proteomics software.
Additional comments:
A real time saver for deploying the same Debian image to all nodes in
a cluster. Thanks guys!
From: Xavier Claessens, probtech +at+ ulb.ac.be
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 14:11:36 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~70
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4 (ubuntu breezy package) and currently migrating to 2.9.1 (ubuntu dapper package)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom 2.6.12 kernel because older kernels have a bug in pcnet32 module.
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops
How do you boot your hosts? from floppy
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing?
hardware are reconized but pcnet32 module is buggy is older kernels
than 2.6.12. Not sure SATA disk drives works good with default kernel.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Département d'informatique de l'ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Additional comments:
FAI is great and very powerful but is still buggy. I hope 2.9.1 will
be more stable. Also it would be great to have configuration examples
for Ubuntu and not only debian.
Thanks for developing FAI !
From: Ryan Nowakowski, ryan =ad_ britestream.com
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:41:43 -0600
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 20 or so.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel-image-2.6.8-fai_1_i386.deb from fai-kernels 1.9.1
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? manufacturing test machines
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
using FAI-CD: *
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing? none
What is the business of your company/organisation? Britestream Networks. We make SSL offload NICs.
Additional comments:
We needed a way to consistently install test machines for manufacturing.
I started with systemimager but the latest release didn't have a 2.6
kernel which was required because of our newer hardware. FAI was easy
to set up.
From: Andrew Ruthven, andrew.ruthven ==a=t catalyst.net.nz
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2006 14:56:32 +1300
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 30-40
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build 2.4.26
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? web server, mail server, generic server, customer premise equipment for wireless network
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: yes
type of network card: via-rhine (Epia Mini-ITX) and whatever is on a SuperMicro P4SGR motherboard
using FAI-CD:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE and DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? At a previous workplace I made extensive use of FAI.
Additional comments:
Initially we started using it for building the wireless CPE boxes to put
out at customers sites. However when I came to rebuild our mail server
cluster I decided to make use of my FAI build environment to make my
life easier. My use of it pretty much grew from there.
It might be of interest you that the initial wireless CPE boxes were
built by dd'ing a master HDD. Then the company that was doing them
started using kickstart (Redhat boxes). We then redesigned them and
started using FAI.
From: Marc SAUVEUR, marc at= 7ici.be
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:40:19 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? first 11 in 1 hour
(march 2005), now i have installed 117 servers HP DL380 and DL 360 with succes and 25 Dell machines
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4 last version for Woody
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? actually i'm using 2-4-24 Fai but i m building a new kernel with support for dell 1650 and 2650
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Actually from floppy with static ip
via network card: next step bootp or dhcp
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: drivers for lsi controller are missing it's mpt module
What is the business of your company/organisation? Internet service Provider, Belgacom NV/SA (Belgium)
From: Werner Fischer, wfischer äd thomas-krenn.com
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 12:47:43 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? currently about 5, number is growing
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.6.8 from fai-kernels 1.9.1
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? web server
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
using FAI-CD: X
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Server distribution, Thomas-Krenn.AG
Additional comments:
We use FAI-CD to install "pre-installed webservers", which our
customers can buy. We have included the installation of SWsoft's PLESK
control panel for webservers. You can find more details here.
FAI is a great piece of software - thank you everybody who developed it!
From: Julia Longtin, risc =äd= volumehost.com
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:16:01 -0600
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 35-40, unsure.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4 with patches.
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.8
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai?
(eg.: desktops, cluster nodes, notebooks, web server, mail server,...)
all of the above. and then some.
The primary DNS server of this organization is an FAI install, along with mail, ftp, www, wineserv...
About half my workstations have been re-installed using my fai-cd.
My robots were installed using fai-cd.
Half my notebooks are fai-cd.
Which version of fai-kernels are you using as your install kernel?
(eg.: kernel 2.4 from fai-kernels 1.8)
(eg.: custom build kernel 2.6)
so far as i know, i'm using 'stock debian 2.6.8-2'
How do you boot your hosts? fai-cd exclusively. For reproducability of procedure.
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? So far, everything is supported.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Financial image processing
Additional comments:
FAI-CD is now my primary install method, and FAI alone used to be my
primary install method on my clusters.
We use FAI for the reproducability factor. By burning a FAI-CD of our
servers/software, we can at any time revert to a previous version, or
perform disaster recovery. No "system administration" is performed on
live servers.
I've already got my subversion account for backporting/merging my patches.
From: Petr Kubanek, petr=kubanek.net
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:52:10 +0000
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 4
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6.11
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: X
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing?
What is the business of your company/organisation? High Energy Astrophysics Department, Ondrejov Observatory, Czech Academy of Sciences
Additional comments:
If you speak czech language:
http://www.root.cz/clanky/fai-full-automatic-installer/
From: Sirk Johannsen, sirk.johannsen _a_t minick.net
Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 15:43:19 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? approx. 60 by now
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.3
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6.8
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card: see below
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: BOOTP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
No. We had to customize our own kernel to support Broadcom Network cards (module tg3).
Which drivers are missing? tg3
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? cluster nodes (tomcat-cluster), web server, mail server, java-application server.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Minick
Additional comments:
We have 2 FAI Install Server (one in our Datacenter and one in our office).
Both are synchronized using rsync to be able to install any host in any location.
From: Mattias Wadenstein, maswan(a)hpc2n.umu.se
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 15:06:23 +0200 (MEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Between 415-420 hosts.
The clusters:
190 nodes dual opteron running amd64
120 nodes dual athlon MP running woody
100 nodes pentium4 running woody
Which version of fai are you using? An old woody version and a fresh version that we are setting up for
installing sarge or a current ubuntu.
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom 2.4 on the old machines and custom 2.6 on the new ones.
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: yes
type of network card: various, mostly e1000 and tg3 these days
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Mostly cluster nodes. We have 2-4 admin workstations
that are also FAI installed, and a few servers.
What is the business of your company/organisation? HPC2N - High Performance Computing Center North at Umeå University
Additional comments:
We use FAI for a convenient and customisable mass installation of clusters.
We have these pictures that go together with some text about the clusters:
Then lots of various pictures of our hardware:
From: S. Kaikkonen, skaikkon #at# netlab.hut.fi
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:23:33 +0300 (EEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Now we have only 10 nodes in the cluster, later many more
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.9.1
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? cluster nodes / computers for networking experiments
How do you boot your hosts?
via network card: yes (and sometimes from CD)
type of network card: 3c905
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE, DHCP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? No problems
What is the business of your company/organisation?
Research/education, Helsinki University of Technology, Networking Lab
Additional comments:
We need a small cluster to make efficient computing possible. Also
various networking related measurements and software development would
be done using the same infrastructure. Utilizing the automatic
installation and other tools / technologies the objective is to create
a system that makes it possible for different researchers to easily
configure / load a needed environment and also network topology.
From: Roberto Giana
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 07:34:07 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 3
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.9.1
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? cluster nodes, single servers
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card: Onboard (RTL8139c chipset)
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: DHCP & PXE
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? no
Which drivers are missing? None. But IDE disk detection didn't work.
I had do the corrections as mentioned in http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fai@rrz.uni-koeln.de/msg02948.html
What is the business of your company/organisation? No company, just home usage.
Additional comments:
I'm running a bunch of small PCs, which I use for testing different
software. Sometimes as cluster, somtimes as single servers. Looking
for a simple way to set them back to a basic debian installation using
network boot I found FAI. I'm happy with it!
From: Kenny Duffus
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 10:09:29 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? approx 55 machines
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.6 from package 1.9.1
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai?
desktops (staff and lab machines), servers
How do you boot your hosts? from floppy/cdrom image of floppy, using DHCP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde
Additional comments:
much better than golden images
From: Christopher Huhn, linuxgroup =a@ gsi.de
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 11:11:10 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Only ~ 10 - 15 yet.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom 2.6.10 kernel.
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai?
test desktops, test cluster nodes, web server, NFS server
Yet to come: mail server, HA clusters, other services (LDAP, Radius ...)
Our production desktops and batch cluster nodes are running NFS rooted,
creation of both the NFS root images and the local /var and /tmp shall
be done with FAI in the future.
Our notebooks are installed with SuSE, maybe some day done with FAI ...
(I already had a short look into fai4rh)
How do you boot your hosts? PXE, Intel e100 and e1000 and some
Broadcom tg3, very old ones with etherboot-PXE-floppies
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing? I don't remember exactly, but I think XFS
was missing and the AMD64 kernel lacked a 32bit compatability option.
What is the business of your company/organisation? High energy physics research institute,
Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung mbH, Darmstadt
Additional comments:
We are currently becoming quite fond of FAI.
In the long term our complete Debian installation (currently 500+
servers, desktops and cluster nodes) will be done with FAI. For our
current Woody-to-Sarge-transition we are even evaluating if a
reinstallation using FAI is more feasable then a normal upgrade from
Woody to Sarge in some cases (simple services)
It will surely become a central part of our infrastructure management
framework.
Do you have some nice pictures of your installation?
Maybe we can shoot some impressive pictures after the installation of
our 100+ new double Opteron Dual Core boxes in Q4.
From: Klaus Ita, klaus.ita =a=t ai.wu-wien.ac.at
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 16:54:04 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 5*5 + 2
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom built kernel (2.6)
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? desktops for
training classroom (studends), developer tools/machines, java, openoffice, gnome, ldap-clients (authentication), nfs.
How do you boot your hosts? pxe -> dhcp
What is the business of your company/organisation? university, Institute for Information Business
Additional comments:
We are using FAI for setting up our students PC's. We also install
win-images with fai that are prepared with sysprep. For customization
we are using a lot of cfengine that is started by FAI.
setup time for linux: ~7min
From: James Bromberger, james __@= rcpt.to
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 09:44:33 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 60-80
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.3
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.4.27-fai
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Web servers
How do you boot your hosts? PXE & DHCP
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? Probably
Which drivers are missing? Possibly sensors (hardware monitoring)?
What is the business of your company/organisation? Web publishing and advertising
Additional comments:
Rapid deployment of web servers
From: Daniel Hamilton
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 22:07:15 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Cluster currently consists of only 8 nodes (excluding Sun server)
... but plans for more ... lots more ;0)
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
Custom build 2.4.18 kernel for Sun UltraSparc Server.
Custom build 2.4.18 kernel for i686 Dual Athlon FAI Server.
Custom build 2.4.18 kernel for i686 Dual Athlon cluster nodes.
... I like custom.
Which types of hosts are you installing with fai? Cluster nodes.
How do you boot your hosts?
Via network card: Yes
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: Yes
Type of network card (i686 FAI server & nodes) : Intel EEPro100 (onboard)
Type of network card (Sun DHCP,DNS,NTP,NFS... etc server) : Sun
Happymeal and 3Com 3C905c "boomerang" (PCI Cards)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Academic
Additional comments:
The current installation is intended as a proof of concept for the CFD
work being done on the cluster.
To install cluster used for CFD work. FAI's great! Cheers! :0)
From: Kalle Happonen, kalle.happonen ä|t hip.fi
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:30:12 +0300
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Around 10 cluster nodes
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.4 from fai-kernels 1.9.1
How do you boot your hosts? from floppy
Does the default install kernel recognize all your hardware? Yup
What is the business of your company/organisation? Research, Helsinki Institute of Physics, Technology Programme
Additional comments:
We use FAI to install compute nodes on a small grid cluster, and
simply reinstall compute nodes in case of problems.
Also FAI is used to reinstall a sandbox server which users may test & play
around with. If we want to keep something new even after the reinstall,
the packages and configuration files are added simply to the FAI class.
From: Richard Wonka, richard.wonka a|t altanapharma.de
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 14:45:42 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 20+
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6
How do you boot your host?
via network card or cd using BOOTP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? nope
Which drivers are missing: mptscsih,aacraid
What is the business of your company/organisation? Pharmaceutical research, ALTANA Pharma AG
Additional comments:
I had initial problems that have been solved in cooperation with the
author(s) and a great community. Most of the trouble came from having
to install very different hosts, x86 as well as amd64, with very
different hardware-setup and uses. Not your usual setup, I guess.
Also not being able to have one's own DHCP-server is a pain. We're now
installing a small cluster as well as different workstations and some
servers. All going well so far. :-)
From: Steffen Grunewald, aei.mpg.de
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 15:45:00 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? more than 200
* a small Alpha cluster:
- 1 Alpha XP900 head node
- 10 Alpha XP1000 slave nodes
* Merlin (http://pandora.aei/mpg.de/merlin/):
- 4 Dual Athlon head nodes
- 180 Dual Athlon slave nodes (picture)
* a handful of other servers
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8.3
* started with 2.6.x in July 2004
* now running 2.8.3 (with the 2.8.4 sources fix patched in)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.9
How do you boot your host? PXE (EtherExpressPro/100, E1000 on board)
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: 3ware support, in particular 9000 series
What is the business of your company/organisation? Research, Max Planck Institute
for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), The MERLIN Gravitational Waves Cluster
Additional comments:
We used FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) to make the move to Debian
less painful - and it proved to be a great setup tool!
From: Manuel Kiessling, manuel+ät+kiessling.net
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 13:41:29 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 12
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? using custom build kernel 2.4
via network card: all
type of network card: mostly Intel e100/e1000, some SiS900
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: using PXE and DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? WWW search engines, online auctions, SMS services
Additional comments:
I've used FAI to set up the server cluster (web/sql) for our new reverse auction platform.
FAI is a beast at first, but once I could master it, I loved it! Definitifely worth the hassle.
From: Christopher Redmon, credmon|at|ece.utk.edu
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 19:55:08 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Approximately 40, soon to be approximately 70 total.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4, FAI for Solaris
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom 2.6.10, stock 2.4.27
How do you boot your host?
via CD-ROM: X
via network card: X
type of network card: SUNWeri, SUNWhme, SUNWskge
ARP/RARP, BOOTP: X
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Education/Research,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Additional comments:
FAI is used for reinstalling labs and servers. The original disk partitioning
routine has been modified to allow for machines to utilize software RAID.
Also, FAI for Solaris has allowing us to have code reuse, and to have a
similar installation platform for Solaris and Linux.
From: Justin Beckley jbeckley=at_ece.utk.edu
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 13:59:19 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 40ish
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom 2.6.10
How do you boot your host? CD actually
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No, (maybe yes)
Which drivers are missing: We had a PERC card it wouldn't recognize.
We have already got our custom 2.6.10 installed before we realized
that our PERC card was bad.
What is the business of your company/organisation? College Education
Additional comments:
The default kernel is supposed to have PERC modules installed. Our
card was bad, but didn't know it since the box was 7 days old.
From: Michael Gellman, m.gellman =ät_ imperial.ac.uk
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 14:41:14 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~70
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? using custom-built kernel 2.4.27
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: X
via network card: X
type of network card: Intel EEPRO 10/100
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: None
What is the business of your company/organisation? Education/Research
Additional comments:
Managing a networking testbed for experimental routing protocols. Our
project site is here
From: Daniel J. Priem, danielpriem _ät- flexserv.de
Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 16:46:19 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 12
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.4.30
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: 5
via network card:7
type of network card: PXE/BOOTP
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none
What is the business of your company/organisation? administration of remote located server, Flexserv
Additional comments:
ship preinstalled servers to customers including a recoverydisc
From: Guejo, glatapoui _at_ gmail.com
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 02:10:10 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 29
Which version of fai are you using? First 2.7 then 2.8 (by dpkg)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? none, I use a customly build 2.6.11.5 version
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: no
via network card: no
type of network card: no
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE with DHCP.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? no, a GigaByte Ethernet card can't be found.
Which drivers are missing: sk98lin_v8.15
What is the business of your company/organisation? IMFS (Institut de Mecanique des Fluides et des Solides)
It is a public institute about solid & fluid mechanism (as you probably guessed :)
Additional comments:
Thank you. ;)
From: Henning Sprang, henning_sprang ät gmx.de
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 16:26:58 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 3
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6 and 2.8
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.6.8 from fai-kernels
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes
via network card: yes
type of network card: realtek 8139 and others
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE and DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? seems so.
What is the business of your company/organisation? private hacking for fun :)
From: Ognyan Kulev, ogi _at= fmi.uni-sofia.bg
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 15:40:22 +0300
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 20
Which version of fai are you using? 2.8
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.4 from fai-kernels 1.9
How do you boot your host? from floppy, with manually changed fixed IPs
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Education,
Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Sofia, Bulgaria
Additional comments:
The installed hosts are in labs.
From: anonymous, unibas.ch
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 10:53:08 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~5
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.8.2
How do you boot your host?
via network card: X
type of network card: Intel: i810 e100, 3Com 3c59x
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE, DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Academic/Education (Library), University Library Basel, Switzerland
Additional comments:
We are evaluating fai for setting up all new Debian Systems, mainly
terminal servers (Nomachine NX) and some standalone systems (notebooks).
As an alternative I will test also the comercial cloning product Rembo
(http://www.rembo.com/products_toolkit.htm), that is already licensed in
our organisation.
From: Michael Tautschnig, michael.tautschnig _at zt-consulting.com
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 11:54:23 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~50
Which version of fai are you using? I' using FAI since 2.4, currently 2.8
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.4
How do you boot your host?
via network card: yes
type of network card: PXE, DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: I didn't try... :-(
What is the business of your company/organisation? University, Technische Universität München,
Lehrstuhl für theoretische Informatik und künstliche Intelligenz
Additional comments:
We are using FAI and the new softupdate-feature for the complete
management of our system - and it works great!
From: Stefan Berder, sbe _at= oleane.net
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 19:39:15 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~300
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Used to use fai-kernels 1.6 and now a custom 2.4.29 kernel
How do you boot your host?
via network card: yes
type of network card: eepro100, tg3 or bcm5700
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE + DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: tg3 and bcm5700 but that's quite usual ::)
What is the business of your company/organisation? ISP, TRANSPAC (FranceTelecom)
Additional comments:
FAI is used to install fresh servers for our service platform, it's
also used to reinstall servers that are already in the datacenter
without moving to this place (25km for work). I just installed 2 NICs
in the FAI server, one public interface and one private with all my
gateways as aliases, the private interface is in a special VLAN and
I'm doing netfilter NAT between the private and the public interface
to get access to the "outside". To reinstall a server I just need to
change it's VLAN and reinstall it. I got to do that cause I use 2
repositories, none of them is on the FAI machine.
From: Mathew A. Chrystal, matt =at chrystal-2.science.nd.edu
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 11:12:25 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? approximately 70 machines have been installed
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.3
at the present time i am using 2.6.3. i had upgraded to 2.6.6 but
was having some problems with the install being unable to resolve
names so i went back to 2.6.3 and it worked fine.
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? none, using a custom kernel 2.4.26
How do you boot your host? Two types of installation were done:
1) 16 node beowulf cluster amd athlon 2600 which used dhcp on the
headnode and pxe to install the clients. card was 3c996b-t (gigabit).
2) various desktop machines boot with cdrom and dhcp.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: some of the sata drivers were missing and i think they are included now.
What is the business of your company/organisation? university of notre dame
Additional comments:
mass installations of user computers and beowulf style clusters.
I have written a paper for secure installations using debian and fai for a recent sans (GSEC) certification.
From: Andreas Schockenhoff
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 21:48:53 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 5 in production,
a gateway with packetfilter, a proxy for mail, http ...., a internal server
with imap, dns, hylafax ....., our main server with a database LTSP and samba.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.7 and newer :-)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.8.1
(I will allways try to update to the newest version)
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Only if it necessary
via network card: PXE
type of network card: tulip, e100, e1000
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? mostly
Which drivers are missing: No.
What is the business of your company/organisation? EKF Elektronik, Develop hardware for embedded computer
Additional comments:
FAI helps us to set up debian systems. We use LTSP, so we need not so
much clients. But I plan to use more Linux workstations.
We install our servers with fai. We often have new hardware that we must
test or debug, so we like quick installation of operating systems.
From: Ingo Wichmann, linuxhotel.de
Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 11:21:43 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 20
Which version of fai are you using? woddy 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.4 kernel
How do you boot your host? PXE
What is the business of your company/organisation? Linux training, Linuxhotel
From: Robin Schröder, tp4.ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 15:41:58 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 8 hosts (AMD Opteron Cluster, amd64), 19 hosts (Computer Information Pool, x86)
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6 (AMD Opteron Cluster) on x86 server,
2.6.5 (Computer Information Pool) on another x86 server
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? amd64 Kernel and nfsroot from FAI web page,
kernel 2.4 from fai-kernels 1.8.1 (Computer Information Pool, x86)
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Computer Information Pool, x86
via network card: AMD Opteron Cluster, amd64
type of network card: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 10)
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE, DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? research and apprenticeship,
Chair for Theoretical Physics IV
From: Federico Sevilla III, jijo =at free.net.ph
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 19:38:41 +0800
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 40 and growing
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom-built 2.4 Linux kernel with support for the XFS filesystem
How do you boot your host? From floppy. Migrating to PXE boot.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing? We also need to work around the default LILO configuration of FAI
which writes the boot sector to the boot partition instead of to the MBR, which destroys XFS.
What is the business of your company/organisation?
Q Software Research Corp. is a consultancy firm that specializes in free and open source software solutions,
including customized research and development work for various clients.
Shopwise - Rustan Supercenters, Inc. is one of the leading hypermarts in the Philippines and is in the
process of migrating their branches to a Linux-based Point of Sale solution developed in-house.
Additional comments:
QSR developed a fully automatic installation system to support the
deployment of the Linux-based Point of Sale system of Shopwise. At
present (Q1 2005), Shopwise in Cubao (Quezon City, Philippines) with
about 40 active Point of Sale terminals has been migrated to Linux
using FAI. We are also in the process of upgrading the facilities in
the Alabang (Muntinlupa, Philippines) branch, which will also include
a Linux deployment using FAI.
From: Ben Vanhaeren
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 10:47:10 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 50
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.6 from 1.8.2
How do you boot your host?
via network card: using PXE
type of network card: intel e1000 and 3com 3c59x
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes, no problems here
What is the business of your company/organisation? Nuclear research facility
SCK-CEN (Belgian Nuclear Research Centre):
Additional comments:
We use fai to install new nodes on our Beowulf cluster. We also use it as a
quick failure revovery system / diagnostic system in case one of the nodes
goes down.
From: Ulrich Scholler
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 19:35:37 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~20
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4 running on Woody to install Woody
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom-built 2.4.20
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
empty, but bootable CD: * (floppy was just too slow)
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
It didn't at the time (FAI-Kernels were 2.4.18)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Department of Numerical Methods in Mechanical Engineering is a
department within mechanical engineering at TU Darmstadt. Our "business" is teaching and research.
From: Pedro Ferreira, pedro.m.ferreira -at- gmail.com
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 14:35:06 +0000
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 15
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? build my own fai-kernel from kernel 2.6.10
How do you boot your host?
floppy and PXE
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
PERC wasnt working width the default fai-kernel
missing raid in scsi low level drivers
What is the business of your company/organisation? PTC - DRI
Additional comments:
I used fai for installing the following :
PowerEdge 2850 width e1000, PERC and 4 CPUS
PowerEdge 750 , PII, PIII, PIV
We are using fai for quickly install some machines that will work as
toolboxes, and we are also using fai for building an pseudo-recovery
system.
Fai is a little difficult to understand at first but as we go along
its pretty easy.
From: Alexander Bugl, bugl -at dkrz.de
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 09:47:38 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? approx. 60 workstations
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1 (production) 2.6.6 (experimental)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
custom build kernel 2.4.29 (production)
kernel 2.6 from fai-kernels 1.8.2 (experimental)
How do you boot your host? floppy + PXE, DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? maybe, did not test the defaults, as I use custom kernels
What is the business of your company/organisation? Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
To understand processes of the earth system, and to measure their
effects on climate changes.
Additional comments:
FAI is currently used for installing workstations used by scientists.
We plan to use the upcoming version of Debian "sarge" for all Linux
machines, and to use FAI to install workstations and servers.
From: Jeroen Akershoek, Jeroena -at- sara.nl
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:49:22 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 40+
Which version of fai are you using? Whichever is current in Debian/Testing (at the moment 2.6.5)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build 2.6 kernel
How do you boot your host? PXE or boot-CD if no PXE available
What is the business of your company/organisation? High-end scientific visualization
Additional comments:
We use it for fresh installs of new machines and clusters and periodical update
of workstations configurations
From: Vincent Kraeutler, vincent :at igc.phys.chem.ethz.ch
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:12:08 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 60
45 dual athlon mp 2400+, msi k7d,
15 athlon xp 2400+, asus a7v8x
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel-image-2.6.8-fai_1_i386.deb
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: yes
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: pxe
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes, as of kernel-image-2.6.8-fai_1_i386.deb.
before that, the broadcom NIC drivers were missing.
What is the business of your company/organisation? biomolecular simulation at the ETH Zurich
and use fai for the (mostly) automated installation of our computational cluster.
Additional comments:
personally, i have found the docs to be very extensive, but rather
confusing and at times misleading and/or out of date. the latter is
obviously largely due to the fact that fai seems to be evolving
rather quickly. still, it should be noted that i have resolved my
problems mostly by reading the mailing list and the source (very
readable, by the way), rather than the official documentation.
i would like to suggest that the following be added to the documentation:
-- the addition of a flow-chart or some other high-altitude flyover of the fai
boot process to the docs.
-- a wikification of the fai documentation process. fai seems to have
a rather supportive community. decentralizing the documentation process
might help in keeping its large body of documentation well-written,
accurate and up-to-date.
From: Jens Bergmann, jens.bergmann -at ewetel.de
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 18:46:33 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~65
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.6
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? custom build kernel 2.6.9 (added some modules/changed modules to built-in)
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card: (vendor/module) Broadcom/TG3, Intel/E1000, Intel/E100, 3com/3c59x
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: megaraid (megaraid2 - new version of 2.6.9)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Internet Service Provider and Telco
Additional comments:
Central FAI Server serving a dedicated installation network at 3 locations in Germany.
From: anonymous
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:51:40 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 3 Opteron Systems (planned 40 Sun VX0z Machines), 5 Laptops, 5 Desktop Systems
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.5BETA for the Opteron systems, 2.6.6 for the others
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
For the Desktop using custom build kernel 2.6
For the opterons a costom 2.4.27-om (openmosix) Kernel, derived from the clusterknoppix CDROM
How do you boot your hosts?
Via PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No.
Which drivers are missing:
The VX0z Boxes miss a driver for the LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI
What is the business of your company/organisation? Teaching and Research in Computational Linguistics.
Additional comments:
Fai is faster than Jumpstart and autoyast! :)
I use FAI as installation tool for Linux and also Windows via partimage and sysprep.
From: Noah Meyerhans noahm - at- csail.mit.edu
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:25:50 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? There are approximately 200 hosts currently running.
These range from servers to cluster nodes to workstations.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom 2.4 build
How do you boot your host? Most are booted via floppy or CD. Some netboot.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing:
We had some problems with missing drivers for newer hardware. SATA and
some broadcom network hardware.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Computer science research lab
Additional comments:
Debian is the official Unix-like system at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab,
and all our machines are installed using FAI. It makes it easy for us
to start all the machines off in the same configuration. We've found
FAI to be flexible enough to handle the installation of numerous
different types of system (including multiple Debian versions) with
widely varying hardware and software configurations. It often takes
some hacking to get things completely right, but the framework is
there and is very usable. Additionally, we've found FAI's fcopy
utility to be very useful for maintaining systems after installation
(though we have hacked it slightly to be quiet in the case where it
doesn't actually copy any file).
From: Heiko Zang, hosteurope.de
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:14:29 +0100 (MET)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~250
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? using kernel custom build kernel 2.4
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: X
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? NO
Which drivers are missing: The former kernel-image-2.4.24-fai
isn`t used in fai anymore, so no more important. aacraid in kernel-image-2.6.8-fai
What is the business of your company/organisation? Internet server hosting, Hosteurope GmbH, Köln
Additional comments:
We are using FAI to install dedicated Internet Servers. No complex class configuration
because FAI only has to differ between IDE, SATA and SCSI Harddisks.
From: David Hausheer, hausheer AT tik.ee.ethz.ch
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:04:06 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 8( 5 identical, 3 different)
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.4 from fai-kernels 1.8.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: using etherboot 5.3.7-3c90x, with PXE/DHCP (from 3 hosts)
via network card: using PXE/DHCP (from 5 hosts)
type of network card: 3c905C-TX/TX-M (6 hosts), 3c905B 100BaseTX (2 hosts)
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE/DHCP only
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none
What is the business of your company/organisation? Research (Networking),
Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK), ETH Zurich
Additional comments:
We are using FAI to setup a small networking testbed which is used by 2
different projects. We need to be able to quickly reconfigure the
network configuration and install new software on all hosts. Also we can
now modify individual hosts for testing purposes and if anything goes
wrong simply reinstall that machine.
3 of our hosts are quite different from the rest, e.g., they are not
able to boot from the network card, 2 of them have SCSI harddisks, while
the others have IDE harddisks, 1 host has two harddisks etc.
Nevertheless we managed to setup a fai configuration with which we can
install all hosts the same way (but using different disk configurations,
special chboot hooks etc.). We are always booting over the network.
Fortunately, all hosts are able to run with the default fai-kernel. Only
the SCSI hosts need a different initrd file.
From: Ben Willcox ben.willcox at british-gymnastics.org
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 12:05:18 +0000
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 7, soon to be 11 more
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel 2.4.27 from fai-kernels 1.8.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes, except for
acpi which works with kernel 2.6.8 from fai-kernels 1.8.1 (but that
won't fit on my bootfloppy.)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Governing body for Gymnastics in the UK
Additional comments:
The initial build of 7 machines was for laptops used as part of our
in-house developed gymnastics scoring system used at major events. The
next 11 are also laptops, but will be used as normal Linux workstations
at remote sites, which are replacing old Windows machines.
From: Thomas Glanzmann sithglan @ stud.uni-erlangen.de
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 14:12:13 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? several hundreds. In production are 110 at the moment.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? we use our own generic install kernel 2.4
How do you boot your host?
via network card: yes
type of network card: eepro100 or 3c509b
PXE + GRUB + grub.conf via network + generic kernel
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Sure it does, but we don't use it anyway, because we have our own
generic kernel with some security patches and local enhancements like:
01.ipv6-2.4-fix
02.ea+acl+nfsacl+sec-2.4.25-0.8.71.diff
03.autofs-patch
04.2.4.28-pre3-syscall-FAUMACHINE
05.nfs-wait.fix
06.IGMP
What is the business of your company/organisation? Public Computer Science CIP Pool of the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen.
Additional comments:
FAI bootstraps our machines and calls cfengine in the last script to do
the host specific configuration. We need absolut no intervention except
for telling the grub config to 'install FAI' to reinstall a machine.
From: Charles Fry cfry at ece.cmu.edu
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 15:40:26 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 78
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? kernel-image-2.4.27-fai from fai-kernels 1.8.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: no
via network card: yes
type of network card: Intel PRO/1000
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Additional comments:
We are using FAI to setup a cluster used for distributed systems research.
From: Francois JEANMOUGIN, Francois.JEANMOUGIN @ 123multimedia.com
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 12:28:23 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 6 already installed, 60 planned, using sarge.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.6.8 form fai-kernels 1.8.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE is managed by Altiris Deployment Console. Last
step of the process is to launch a kernel with loadlin from a small windows
partition. I use a kernel extracted from the boot floppy generated by
make-fai-bootfloppy. For several machines, I will have to give make-fai-bootcd a try.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Yes. (I have to check why I can't connect to the HP bl10e serial console, but
this sooo specific and does not work even with some certified systems).
What is the business of your company/organisation? Mobile services (SMS premimum, imode and such) 123 multimedia
From: anonymous
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:09:46 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? One test host
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.3
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom build 2.6.8.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: X
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? XFS made always problems.
What is the business of your company/organisation? IT-Business
Additional comments:
It is to be used for setting up hosts with identical configurations for
longer time.
From: anonymous
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 15:09:26 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? About 25, monthly increasing
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? self-made kernel
How do you boot your host?
via CDROM:
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? Fully ranged ASP: hosting, housing and dedicated servers,
Service providing/IT Outsourcing: eg. pirobase®
From: anonymous
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 09:45:19 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 32
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Kernel 2.6.x from fai-kernels 1.8.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: x
via network card: xxx
type of network card:
e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.0.18
e100: Copyright(c) 1999-2004 Intel Corporation
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: DHCP, PXE
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
yes
What is the business of your company/organisation?Research
From: Jay Kusler kusler at nscl.msu.edu
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:30:18 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 70+
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? using 1.8.1 currently, with 2.6 kernel,
but have used other versions as well over the last year or so
How do you boot your host?
I boot from a custom boot-cd, but have used both floppy and
PXE boot in the past. CD fits better into our environment. The
CD is basically just a boot CD: no deb archive or anything else.
I generate the iso based on some script I found once (I think a Suse
thing, but I'm not sure)
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes, but I do have
issues with the Compaq SmartArray controller. I have found that if I
replace /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/sbin/sfdisk with a copy from a woody
distribution, it all works fine (of course the disk_config needs to
understand about the /dev/ida mess as well... )
What is the business of your company/organisation? Nuclear physics research
National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory
Additional comments:
We use it to get a consistent, easily installed system. I have classes
for workstations, for file/samba servers, and for a number of variations
in between. FAI with cfengine2 gets me a known-good machine from bare
metal in about 12 minutes.
From: Uli Fietz, Fietz @ BLB-Karlsruhe.de
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 11:17:43 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 42
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.2 with kernel 2.4.18
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: x
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: 3c59x ?
What is the business of your company/organisation? regional research library
Additional comments:
We are installing the machines a clients only for web browsing with
firefox in a special kiosk mode.
From: Robert LeBlanc leblanc at byu.edu
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:19:38 -0600
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 64 node Dual Opteron Beowulf cluster
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom kernel
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: no
via network card: yes
type of network card: Broadcom Extreme
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE, DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? most
Which drivers are missing: lacks Broadcom network drivers
What is the business of your company/organisation? Biological study and research,
Brigham Young University
Additional comments:
We use FAI to set-up and reimage our cluster. Once I find the Debian setting to allow
more rsh connections at once, our cluster can be re-imaged in about 30 minutes.
Every setting I have tried does not affect the amount of connections allowed, but a
bash script just reboots one a minute.
From: Gerfried Fuchs, alfie at sil.at
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:04:01 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~50
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? home brewed
How do you boot your host?
type of network card: BROADCOM Corp.
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? no idea...
Which drivers are missing: tg3 is needed for our hosts, don't know
if it's in. And the special compaq modules, this is the reason
why we brew our own kernel
What is the business of your company/organisation? Silver:Server ISP: mainly access providing; but also quite some housing,
hosting, and other things
Additional comments:
as (re)install image for the dedicated servers we
offer our customers. two classes: maintained (no root access for
customers, admin ssh key login), unmaintained (no login for us)
From: Trishan R. de Lanerolle
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:00:29 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 35
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.7.1
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: using EtherBoot CD + DHCP
type of network card: NForce2
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing: NForce2 network driver.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut USA
Institute of higher education.
Additional comments:
Used to configure and maintain Computer Science Department Linux Laboratories.
FAI significantly reduced installation time and is expected to reduce
upgrade times as well. Overall FAI is a great installer. FAI is
relatively easy to create a one of a kind installation of Linux, with
user defined configurations. We have added personalized settings such
as custom GDM logs as well as 3rd party applications, such as Matlab
and PPR Print Spooler.
However we did find the FAI documentation suffers from a number of
problems, including a failure to correctly explain how to use
Ether-boot instead of PXE and generally confusing terminology and
vague and imprecise wording. For example it took us a long time to
understand that the phrase "define a class" actually means to enable a
class. We almost gave up trying to use FAI due to the ambiguity of the
documentation. A thorough editing of the existing manual would go a
long way towards correcting this problem.
From: Holger Mense hmense at math.uni-paderborn.de
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:54:57 +0200 (MEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~120 Clients and Servers
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? None, we build our own kernel.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes (and CDROM if floppy is not available)
via network card: yes
type of network card: eepro100, eepro1000, tg3, 3c59x
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: yes
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none
What is the business of your company/organisation? University of Paderborn, Mathematics Department
Additional comments:
FAI is used to install several types of clients and servers on
different hardware. With help from kudzu and severall bash-scripts all
necessary hardware informations are detected. FAI is only used for a
base installation (~60 packages) - our self developed software
management system then installs all remaining packages. It is also
later responsible for online-updates and configuration management. It
depends on FAIs class system.
From: Arcady Genkin agenkin at cdf.toronto.edu
Date: 28 Sep 2004 14:20:44 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 113 hosts (106 workstations and 7 compute servers)
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? Custom-built installation kernel to support newer hardware.
How do you boot your host?
We boot all our hosts via PXE+DHCP at install-time. Many hosts have
3COM NICs (3c59x), some have Intel EtherExpress 1000 (e1000).
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
When we first started using FAI, the e1000 driver was missing from
the kernel. Also, some hardware had newer IDE controllers, so we
built our own install kernel, which we are still using. Most
probably, though, by now the default FAI install kernel will work
for us, but there is no need to switch.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Education. We, the CDF support undergraduate
computing needs at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto
Additional comments:
We have over a hundred individual Linux workstations, about fifty
older Sun workstations turned into diskless X terminals, connected
to three Linux compute servers, a bunch of Win2000 machines and a
bunch of specialized servers. All of our user-accessible Linux
machines have been switched from RedHat 7.3 to Debian 3.0 this Fall.
This migration was a rather challenging task, but we are quite happy
with Debian and FAI as the unattended installation method. Now
reinstalling a machine is as simple as rebooting it, since the
boot-up is controlled from our PXE server.
We use FAI to do a minimal installation, installing only the
necessary packages. All of the configuration is then done using
Cfengine 2, which is also used later for keeping the configuration
up-to-date.
We like the fact that the concept of classes is shared by both FAI
and Cfengine, and we use the same classes names for both systems.
The biggest problem with FAI that we observed is that installing a
number of machines in parallel (e.g. 14 machines) saturates the
network and places a heavy load on the NFS server, hosting the
mirror.
Many thanks for providing FAI! Without it going to Debian would not
have been an option for us.
From: Dale Einarson
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:05:19 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Now more then 20, 10 Lab computers, 10 in a cluster
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6 I haven't looked and the updates for a while
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? vmlinuz-2.4.24-fai
can't say that there has been any problems with this... although see later
How do you boot your host? The floppy built by an earlier fai version
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
I have an sl98lin based card that seems to hang on DHCP. Pervious
version of this card (when on-board) seem to work fine. the cards
I have now I still have yet to get working (not enough time to look
at it)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Centre d'Imagerie Cérébrale McConnell, McGill University
Additional comments:
I have a background in cluster management and SMP
presently I have 3 labs to support mostly students developing
software ( 35 linux boxes)
presently one cluster ( 10 DUAL CPU nodes )
I used to clone disks to copy config's... then moved to Kickstart...
(redhat is/was a dead dog) heard about cfengine, never got to it... A
fellow I worked with (Andrew Jenke) started up FAI... I am sold! FAI
is a playground for out caffeine induced development!
Thanks to you for creating something so cool that I can respond to :)
Thank you all for your project and wisdom!
From: Harald Gröne ha at mst.hamtec.de
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 11:31:08 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 7
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.7.1 + custom kernel
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: or CDROM, if PXE is not available
via network card: PXE or etherboot
type of network card: e100,e1000, sis900, 8139too, via-rhine,
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE, dhcpd3, bootp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none
What is the business of your company/organisation? network security consultant
Additional comments:
I implement firewalls, mail servers, fax servers, samba servers and terminal
servers with FAI.
All systems run for different customers on different hardware. I'm still
struggling with the class concept to keep everything tidy. I manage my fai
tree with CVS and I try to migrate to branched CVS now.
Some of the systems are not static, I'd like to see some restore procedure in
FAI, to read back the actual state of passwd, shadow, group, named.conf, DNS
zones and databases (mysql) from some directory tree or mounted backup media.
I think, this is a quite common scenario, so it shoud get into the examples.
I had problems with SIS mainboards. Seem's, they had some undocumented
bios bugs/features. They got very slow after 20 minutes, though Power Saving
was completly disabled.
From: Cyril Bouthors, cyril at jexiste.org
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:28:44 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Already 10 hosts but 20 more hosts are planned.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.6.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.7.1 with kernel 2.6.7
How do you boot your host? From network card (nvidia nforce2 ethernet), using PXE + DHCP.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No.
Which drivers are missing: forcedepth
What is the business of your company/organisation? Jexiste, Internet web hosting.
From: Harald Staub, staub at switch.ch
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 23:32:21 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~20
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? self made kernels
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card: mostly Broadcom 570x
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE + DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? SWITCH - The Swiss Education & Research Network
Our two most important activities:
- operating and enhancing the Swiss university network
- registering domain names ending in .ch and .li
Additional comments:
We are interested in the extensions currently known as pfai
to get a configuration management system. When looking at
the concepts of the tree of configuration files and the fcopy
command, this looks like a small step for fai with a big win.
From: Philipp Sacha fai (at) blue-cable.net
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 07:25:30 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~30
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE, DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing:
I do not use the default kernel, because i need support for the xfs
filesystem. Therefore i have built my own kernel, version 2.4.26, based
on the config from the kernel in the 1.6 package.
For setting up harddisks with LVM and XFS i use the setup_harddisks
script from Sam Vilain. I had to patch it a little bit, because there
were some failures in setting up ide drives with software raid and LVM.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Cable ISP
Additional comments:
We have slightly different hardware and we needed to setup different
machine types. The machine types differ from the software packages which
have to be installed. A machine type might be for example MySQL-,
News-Server or MTA.
To be able to install different machine types on different hardware i
have implemented dialogs which will be shown when a new installation
starts. In the first dialog one have to choose the hardware, afterwards
the machine type and finally the servers name and ip address.
P.S. I´d like to mention, that FAI is an excellent piece of software.
From: Nicolas Courtel courtel at cena.fr
Date: 24 Aug 2004 10:59:27 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 33
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4 currently upgrading to 2.6.1;
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6, currently upgrading to 1.7
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: only when PXE is not available on the (old) client
via network card: most of the time
type of network card: Intel, 3Com, Realtek, nForce, ...
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE + DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing:
-> Broadcom 4400 (for newer Dell Inspiron laptops)
-> nForce (for some nForce1 motherboards, nForce2 also has a 3Com Ethernet)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Centre d'Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne
Working on software for air traffic control, we try original solutions
that might be useful in future operational software
Additional comments:
Our FAI server is directly connected to 3 separate networks, and supports both
Woody and Sarge installations: 2 config directories, 2 NFS roots, and 2 groups
in dhcpd.conf, so that we can choose which system is installed on a client.
Only one FAI kernel, though, built locally, and that includes the 2 network
drivers we need for some hosts.
And thanks for this great software!
From: Paul Nijjar pnijjar at utm.utoronto.ca
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 12:46:44 -0400 (EDT)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Maybe 50 so far?
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes (Static IP)
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP or DHCP:
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? It recognises all network cards we use frequently.
How many hosts have you installed using fai?
Maybe 50 so far?
What is the business of your company/organisation?
We are a nonprofit organization. This project redistributes donated
computers to individuals and groups. We use FAI to install Linux on
some donated computers. The Working Centre in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
Additional comments:
Our purpose in using FAI is to customise the installer so it is easy
for our volunteers to use (many of them have never used Linux before).
I find the following components of FAI very useful:
- Being able to put the installer on a bootable CD
- Partitioning disks via config files
- Choosing software sets based on the disk sizes/RAM of our
computers
- Good support via the mailing list
Things I don't like:
- Scripts/hooks are not stable between releases, so I have to merge
changes to scripts after each release or risk breakage. My current
policy is to do all my customization via hooks, not scripts.
- The chroot environment causes problems (e.g. in using dpkg)
From: Oliver Eberlein
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 12:55:59 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 30
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? self made kernels
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: mostly
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: now testing PXE boot
What is the business of your company/organisation? local telephone company
and ISP, Network Engineering & Design (NED), www.netcologne.de
Additional comments:
FAI has eased the work enormously. We had only minor problems with
the hardware detection.
From: Gilbert Laycock g.laycock at mcs.le.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:08:04 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~150 so far
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4, testing 2.5.5beta for the
round of new installs due over the summer.
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3, (a 2.4.24 kernel), moving to custom
built kernel.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes (older PIII machines with non PXE nic)
via network card: Yes
type of network card: e100, realtek 8139, 3c905
BOOTP, PXE, DHCP: PXE and DHCP (but some issues with conflicts
with campus wide DHCP system)
Does the default kernel recognise all your hardware? No problems.
What is the business of your company/organisation? University, School of Maths &
Computer Science, University of Leicester
Additional comments:
We use fai to deploy linux (and a win2000 image) to all the machines
in out teaching labs, and also fro installing to new staff
machines. Having such a powerful standard install system has meant a
great saving of time, although the learning curve was steep.
From: Heiner Mudersbach, infos at fms-computer.com
Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 20:14:17 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai?
In combination with Debian linux installations we built serveral HPC
clusters with AMD AthlonMP, Intel Pentium3, Pentium4 and Intel Xeon
(about 200-300 machines) and some AMD Opterons in 32bit mode so
far. Plus lots of pre-installed servers for customers as webserver,
database-server, router, application-server and so on.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4 and 2.5.5beta (with upcoming AMD64 support)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: No.
via network card: Yes, via PXE.
type of network card: Various, mostly Gigabit Ethernet like Intel PRO/1000,
Broadcom 570x, Marvell
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCPv3
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
We normally use our own customized kernels. This is not FAI specific.
What is the business of your company/organisation?
Customized, linux-compatible high-quality servers and clusters, not only x86
but also 64bit platforms like Alpha (in the past) and AMD64 (today).
FMS Computer & Kommunikationssysteme fms-computer.com
Additional comments:
We are using a debian-based environment for testing purposes and
pre-installations with PXE network boot and FAI autoinstaller.
Right now it is only 32bit but we are working on the new 64bit environment
for AMD64/EM64T based on Debian-AMD64 Unstable.
Additionally we are looking for a port of FAI for SuSE and/or RedHat/Fedora,
but this is work in progress I guess :-).
From: anonymous
Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 17:34:48 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? About 40, monthly increasing by 1 or two.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? self-made kernel
How do you boot your host?
via network card: X
type of network card: BROADCOM BCM570x
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation?
Full ranged ISP: mainly access providing, but also hosting and
dedicated servers (this is where FAI is used), both managed and
unmanaged.
From: anonymous
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 14:48:47 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 3
different machines from different classes yet. A PIV 2,8 an PII333 and a
Pentium 166. The installation of the new pool (15-25 machines) was
schedules for September, but will probably happen to take place in the
beginning of 2005.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
I do only use selfcompiled Kernels. I know them best. :)
I do run 2.4.26 on the Clients and 2.4.22 on the server.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes, rom-o-matic boot floppy
via network card: yes
type of network card:e1000,eepro, viarhine,rtl3139
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
I always use my selfcompiled Kernel.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Education
Additional comments:
I'm using it as Software deploy System in my local network. It currently
installs two kinds of Systems: a) A Dualboot Debian-Linux and Win2000
client ready to log in (Install time on a PIV: ~15 Minutes, sysprep run
included) b) A Debian system. Install time: 15 Minutes on a P166, 5-7
Minutes on a PIV.
I install a bootmanager which gives the user 5 Boot options: a) linux
normal b) Linux reinstall c) windows reinstall d) reinstall all e)windows
The system will be used to serve roughly 30-50 clients within the next
half year. Hopefully other faculties will use the system, too.
All in all: Yiepie! I can stop wasting time with client installation and
Maintainance. That was the piece missing to become a real System Architect
on a Linux System. Unfortunately, now my jumpstart installation will
become useless...guess my solaris boxen will run Linux too, soon. ;)
From: Mike Horansky moho AT stanford.edu
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 17:03:36 -0700
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 14
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6 (customized to work with Dell 1750)
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: no
via network card: always
type of network card: eepro100, tg3
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? no
Which drivers are missing: megaraid2 (for kernel 2.4.24)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Educational, ITSS/Stanford University
Additional comments:
I found fai harder to learn than redhat's kickstart, but I found it to
be much more powerful. The documentation took some getting used to.
We are, to begin with, using FAI to build our webmail servers, mail
routers, and mysql server.
From: Bernd Broermann, bernd at broermann.com
Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 09:13:05 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 4
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6, special kernels for FAI
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes
via network card: rtl8138, sis900 , 3c5?? all PXE
type of network card:
DHCP:
What is the business of your company/organisation? IT-Service
for companys, Broermann Technologie-Beratung, Hamburg
Additional comments:
I was looking for a Backup/Recovery which I can control over remote
access. It should work for Linuxservers and Windows clients. Before
FAI I worked with Knoppix, which also can boot over network. But on
Knoppix you have to start sshd and set an password. With FAI I can
tell the clients in the network what they should do.
Setup of windows can cost a lot of time, even when there should run a
lot of special software. critical applications should have short
downtimes, when they crash. For Windows backup I used partimage 6.4.
From: Holger Levsen, hl at hbt.de
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 15:35:12 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~70 and increasing
Which version of fai are you using? As of 2004-05-24 we use 2.3.1
for production, but we will soon redesign our linux infrastructure
with fai 2.5.4 - both with Debian "woody".
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? none, we built our own
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: some
via network card: no, has not been necassary so far
type of network card: pcnet32 eepro100 e1000 3c90x 3c59x
BOOTP or DHCP: BOOTP
from cd: some more (bootfloppy burned on cd)
We boot them once for the first time from those media. After that, we boot
from harddisc only as we install a fai boot kernel on it, too.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? no
Which drivers are missing: e1000, disc drivers are important, too: raid, scsi
What is the business of your company/organisation? HBT, Hamburger Berater Team GmbH,
founded in 1983, is a ISO9001-2000 certified consulting company. 28 coworkers
offer IT consulting and services, application development and business consulting.
For more information see http://www.hbt.de (german only at the moment) or
visit www.geofox.de (also in english)
Additional comments:
We are using FAI to install (almost) all of the Linux-Systems (servers
and clients) in a mixed infrastructure (Windows 2000 and Debian/GNU
Linux). We built an environment for developement and testing of our
products (E.g. www.geofox.de, a passenger timetable information
system written in Java), which need many systems with different configurations.
The characteristic of our infrastructure is the large number of
sometimes slightly different systems for which we need about 40
different configurations for about 70 installed systems in FAI. To
fit new requirements from these many different configurations we now
need to re-design and re-organize our fai setup.
At the moment we have eight (8!) FAI servers in our company: one for
production, one for testing and each member of the infrastructure team
has at least one "own" FAI server to develope and test FAI classes.
Using FAI we are able to maintain this heterogenous infrastructure by means
of about one admin. But of course the developement of new systems needs more manpower
as well as using new features of FAI like fai-bootcd or fai-configdir from cvs.
FAI is a very great tool, thanx for your nice job Thomas and all the other contributors !
From: alexander zangerl az+fai@bond.edu.au
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 15:00:55 +1000
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 26 lab machines, plus a couple of test boxes
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yep
via network card: nope, too much hassle (for now)
type of network card: 3c905
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? no, see recent fai-kernels bugrep.
Which drivers are missing: ide-detect is not autoloaded.
What is the business of your company/organisation? educational, bond university, australia
Additional comments:
we're using fai to setup a lab of debian systems every trimester.
it works great, but the documentation could stand a bit of improvement
(especially in the area of the client configuration files).
From: Haakon Humberset
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:23:15 +0200 (CEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? About 10 different hosts, about 20 installs total.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? I have fai-kernels 1.5.3
installed, though I've compiled my own fai-kernel, as to support new NICs.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: On some older hosts not able to boot from LAN
or with a non-functional PXE implementation
via network card: Preferably..
type of network card: Intel PRO/1000 nic's built into our
motherboards for our racks, but a wide
variety of others for other computers.
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? Bioinformatics, Interagon AS
From: anonymous
Date: Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 17:49:34 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Still experimenting with four hosts. Could grow up to hundreds.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6
How do you boot your host?
via network card: PXE-boot
type of network card: Intel Pro 100
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing:
The Kernel didn't recognise the 3Ware-SATA-Raidcontroler.
I built my own kernel 2.4.25, based on your config-file, and added
3ware-driver support.
What is the business of your company/organisation? We do ServerHosting,
offering root-Server with Debian-Linux. Would be nice to offer SuSE or
RedHat Linux to our customers in future, automatically installed with FAI.
From: Daniel LEPRINCE calibre at edf.fr
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 12:08:47 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 200 at this day
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? We are using our own kernel
based on GNU/Linux 2.4.21 or 2.4.25
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes on the LAN
via network card: Yes inside Cluster Networks
type of network card: Broadcom 57xx
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? Scientific
Computing for a company of electricity, Electricité de France (EDF)
Additional comments:
We are using FAI for the installation of our Linux Distro called
"Calibre" on the Engineers Workstations. We also use it inside
clusters of PCs, to make the deployment easier. We can easily control
what is installed on each PC by using specific classes.
From: Frédéric BOITEUX fboiteux at calistel.com
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 11:19:51 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~25
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? home-built kernel...
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: yes
type of network card: various, with drivers rtl8139too, eepro100, e1000, tg3, etc.
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? don't know, I use mine.
What is the business of your company/organisation? telecom / phone systems
Additional comments:
I've first used FAI to install Debian systems on boards without CD nor floppy
drives. When it worked (and it works well !), I used it also for almost every
install I can have to do many times... Uses of classes let me define some
profiles, share some scripts, and I appreciate also the fact you can patch
the code to suit our needs (until pacthes are integrated mainstream ;-)
From: Olivier olivier at celia dot u-bordeaux1 dot fr
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 15:39:25 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 4 growing to 25
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.6
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes
via network card: yes (pxe)
type of network card: e1000 tg3
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? University
Additional comments:
I use fai to the installation of all of our linux (sarge, woody)
workstations. (pc's, and workstations).
From: Jim Mintha j.t.mintha at uva.nl
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 00:09:27 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? About 15 so far.
Mostly servers although I'm about to do 10 new desktop machines.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1 About to upgrade to 2.5.4 when I saw the questionaire
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3 (1.6.0 shortly)
How do you boot your host?
Mostly via network card. (3com or Intel with PXE). A couple of
strange machines (either weird network card, or in unaccessible subnet)
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing:
No problems so far. (kernel has all the drivers needed for install,
after we add our own custom kernel package with the rest such as fibre card, etc.)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Education (university)
Additional comments:
We use FAI for the installation of all of our Linux servers. It
allows us to very quickly install new servers and ensures that all of
our servers remain consistent.
From: Yaroslav Halchenko, fai at onerussian.com
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 15:49:11 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 25 amd64 opteron nodes with 32bit Linux.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? none - used our own
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5702
type of network card: Gigabit
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
What is the business of your company/organisation? University/Research
Psych. Dept., Rutgers-Newark, ravana.rutgers.edu
Additional comments:
High learning curve but pleasant experience aftewards. The only problem
I've encountered was apt hanging process during installation of some
programs. May be it was fixed by now - I didn't run FAI afterwards but
looking forward to set it up to be used for any other new comming
machine. After installation the cluster was maintained using
cfengine2
Cluster web page
Pictures of the cluster
From: Aaron T Porter
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:28:26 -0800
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 215 in two clusters,
one 80 dual xeons the other 135 dual opterons
Which version of fai are you using? 2.3.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? homegrown
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: PXE
type of network card: e1000 & tg3
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
What is the business of your company/organisation? Government/Scientific Research
From: Gabriel ILLOUZ, Gabriel.Illouz at limsi.fr
Date:Thu, 26 Feb 2004 18:30:36 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? a dozen
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.4 (just changing, before the woody one 2.5.3)
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? do-it-myself, (some machine with specific hardware)
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Y
via network card: Y
type of network card: MANY
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? nope
Which drivers are missing:
(if I remember well, some mpt scsi, 3ware, some gigagbit eth)
What is the business of your company/organisation? research lab
Language, Information and Representation research group (LIR, LIMSI lab)
Additional comments:
nice and easy to modify package.
Using FAI to install automatically, new and old machine to have a
homogeneous distrib on hetrogeneous machine. One objective will be to
have a cluster of personnal machine during the night for corpus
processing (Natural Language Processing)
From: Jordan Hrycaj jordan at mjh.teddy-net.com
Date: 20 Feb 2004 10:27:59 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? There were about twenty
(or a bit more) different setups. The rest is just cloned.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? customized 2.4.20/2.4.24
(I also need e100), will probably change in future
How do you boot your host?
BOOTP or DHCP: fai installation mostly with pxe when available
What is the business of your company/organisation? domain development, consulting,
company name: Maxina GmbH & Co KG, www.maxina.de
Additional comments:
Fai is used to set up the gw128 appliances that run under debian.
We produce accounting systems for internet access.
From: Arno Wagner wagner at tik.ee.ethz.ch
Date:Tue, 17 Feb 2004 18:23:46 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 20, all identical.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.3
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
No special kernels. We have a stock www.kernel.org 2.4.23 for
installation and an OpenMosix 2.4.22 for operation.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Etherboot 5.3.5-mc1 (was patched for us)
type of network card: Netgear GA302T (Tigon 3 ac9100)
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP. Also for normal operation so we can
select the kernel to boot on each node from
the server.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Research (Networking, Network-Security)
Additional comments:
While a little difficult to initially understand, once you have
grasped the core idea of FAI, it is very easy to use. We have an
experimental cluster intended for frequent re-installation. Since FAI
can install all 20 machines in about 8 minutes, we now do a
reinstallation when we want to upgrade/modify the installation,
instead doing individual modifications on the computers. There are no
user accounts on the machines themselves, so this works well.
From: Andrew Janke rotor at bic mni mcgill.ca
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 10:28:14 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~50 and counting
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.2
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Initially and then from fai-boot
via network card: Soon (I hope, if the PROMS arrive)
type of network card: Linksys (tulip) + 3com
Also ASUS onboard 3c940's but I can't find
a reliable driver (3c2000).
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: tulip
What is the business of your company/organisation? Brain Imaging Centre
(www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca) and when I'm home, another Imaging Centre
(www.cmr.uq.edu.au)
Additional comments:
At the Dept. of Computer we used to use a Redhat kickstart install for
a variety of linux clients with a wide variety of hardware, those
times are now (thankfully) gone. I also use FAI back home (Australia)
to install a small cluster. In short FAI is one of the best tools I
have ever used. Difficult to learn initially but well worth it.
From: anonymous
Date: 03 Feb 2004 18:09:42 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Maybe a dozen or
so since I started this job.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? None, we roll our own kernel.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Never.
via network card: Yes.
type of network card: 3Com Tornado and
Intel EtherExpress Pro/100
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP, PXE, TFTP, in this order.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Which drivers are missing: Dunno, see above.
What is the business of your company/organisation?
We provide computing facilities for a University institute.
It's called "Rechenzentrum des Mathematischen Instituts der
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München".
From: Venkata venkata at cs.uno.edu
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 13:08:02 -0600
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 72
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes
via network card: n/a
type of network card: 3com 3c59x
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none that I know of.
What is the business of your company/organisation? higher education
Additional comments: At the Dept. of Computer
Science at the University of New Orleans, we have used fai to install
a 72-node Beowulf cluster. Each node is a 2Ghz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM and 20GB of
disk. We are also planning to use fai to install linux boxes in student labs.
fai is great -- can't wait until the version for the next release
of debian becomes available. Thanks Thomas.
From: Henning Glawe glaweh at physik.fu-berlin.de
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 10:36:40 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 139
Which version of fai are you using? PFAI, a fork of 2.3.1cvs plus a few
backports from HEAD, currently working on integrating PFAI into FAI
HEAD
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
none. we use a customized kernel (2.4.23 + nfsacl + libata )
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: most computers
via network card: 2*laptop + 1*EPIA
type of network card: e100, via-rhine
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
didn't try default fai kernel for 2 years...
What is the business of your company/organisation? physics department of university (FU Berlin)
Additional comments:
We are a team of 5 admins, so for better cooperation I patched FAI to
support CVS (merged); we need on-line updates, so once again FAI was
patched (half-merged with mainstream fai); currently I'm working on
debconf support (seems to be working, so expect a release soon).
From: John Bazik jsb at cs.brown.edu
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 09:34:13 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~300
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? we build our own
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card: mostly 3com, some intel
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? nope
Which drivers are missing: broadcom ethernet (module-only source)
What is the business of your company/organisation? higher ed
Additional comments:
FAI is an essential part of our infrastructure, we couldn't do without
it. Thanks.
From: Guillaume Lederrey Gehel@LedCom.ch
Date: 11 Oct 2003 12:04:07 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 25
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes
via network card: No
type of network card: 3c905
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: NONE
What is the business of your company/organisation? Technical School
EIF - Ecole d'Ingénieurs de Fribourg (Technical School Fribourg) www.eif.ch
Additional comments:
FAI is used in our school to install one computer room of 25 clients.
Computers have removable disks, one with Windows 2000 one with Debian
GNU/Linux. It took about 2 weeks to deploy FAI.
Thanks for your great job !!
From: Ake.Sandgren@hpc2n.umu.se (Ake)
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 11:54:11 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? +120
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5 + patches
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? None. Only our own kernels.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: X (on our smaller cluster and some older machines)
via network card: X
type of network card: 3com, intel and some others
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Not using default kernel
What is the business of your company/organisation? Educational, High Perfomance Computing
HPC2N, Umea University, http://www.hpc2n.umu.se
From: Michal Svamberg svamberg@civ.zcu.cz
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 15:30:12 +0200 (CEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai?
160 workstations (30 stations use FAI only for install MS Windows image)
20 servers (plan is to next 30 servers install by FAI)
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? I use my own kernels.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: grub
via network card: perex (special bootrom SW) and grub
type of network card: 3c509, 3c905, ne2000
BOOTP or DHCP: booth
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
I have a problem with AACRAID (not in older standard kernels) and I need
a fiber channel driver qla2300 (the driver is outside standard kernels).
What is the business of your company/organisation? education
Laboratory for Computer Science
University of West Bohemia
Czech Republic
Additional comments:
Workstations are installed on demand (from bootmenu by user), logs are
sent by e-mail to administrators. We use BOOTP and DHCP, workstations
have bootroms and use Perex for netboot menu allowing users to select
boot options (operating system, reinstalation, help). We often use
FAI for dual system installation (linux, windows). The FAI choses the
appropriate Windows image, uses 'dd' to write the partition and
resizes it to fit the target partition.
At the university, we use FAI to install AFS, DNS, BOOTP, DHCP,
database, print and other servers.
From: Jan Nabbefeld jan at sigterm dot de
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 19:05:35 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 3 but will be more
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: [X] 3,5"
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none
What is the business of your company/organisation? research, study purpose, FHTW Berlin
We plan to install a pool of 20 debian boxes.
From: Ulrike Nitzsche U.Nitzsche@ifw-dresden.de
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 12:31:36 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? ~100
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: only the hosts with old network cards
via network card: yes
type of network card: eepro100, 3com with bootprom,
DS21140 (tulip) with floppy
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? scientific research, (solid state theory)
Additional comments:
FAI is used to install cluster nodes and to do reproducible
installations of servers. According the fai-kernel version I have to
complete that for cluster nodes I use a self compiled kernel-package
with enabled "big memory (4GB)" option and without initrd. A lot of
unused features are removed (Irda, video, sound, firewire,...) For the
other hosts a recompiled kernel-package without initrd is used.
From: anonymous
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 15:21:36 -0500
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 33 and counting
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3 is installed, but we had
to compile our own kernels for the Broadcom 9570 nic.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Only when the machine doesn't support PXE.
via network card: On machines that support PXE, yes. Mostly dell 1750's.
type of network card: Broadcom 9570
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP with static ip's.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing: Megaraid 1.18j and Broadcom 9570
What is the business of your company/organisation? Electronic Payment Management
Additional comments:
FAI has made our transition from RedHat to Debian one of the most painless
efforts I have ever had the pleasure of completing.
Thanks for your effort.
From: Jacques Foury Jacques.Foury@math.u-bordeaux.fr
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 16:50:20 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 16, growing
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3 but we recently built our own 2.4.21 kernel
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:yes if old PC
via network card:yes
type of network card:intel e1000
BOOTP or DHCP:DHCP with fixed addresses
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No, then we built new one
Which drivers are missing: 3w-xxxx aic79xx
What is the business of your company/organisation? University
Additional comments:
It is a pity Woody does not give the last fai package...
and the fai-kernels should be up-to-date and generic as often as possible !
Indeed a great work !!! Thank you Thomas !
From: Ari Pollak ari@debian.org
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 09:13:34 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 12+
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 2.4.20
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP, with static server IP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
What is the business of your company/organisation? College of computer & information science
From: Joerg Lehmann Joerg.Lehmann@Physik.Uni-Augsburg.DE
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 14:00:55 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? Around 80 at the moment
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? None, we use our own customized kernels
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes (old hosts)
via network card: Yes (new hosts)
type of network card: various types (mostly Intel e100)
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Does not apply since we use our self-built kernels
What is the business of your company/organisation? University,
Universität Augsburg, Institut für Physik
Additional comments:
We started using FAI some years ago for the installation and the administration
of Linux desktop systems. Subsequently, we started deploying Linux servers with
the help of FAI. Our most recent FAI project was a Linux cluster with one master
(IBM x345) and 16 compute nodes (IBM x335).
For the administration of the clients, we use a stripped down version
of the FAI install script, which works quite well.
From: Souchon Yann
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 11:42:05 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 5
Which version of fai are you using? 2.5
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: No
via network card: Yes
type of network card: Broadcom 9570 (DELL PowerEdge 1750)
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No
Which drivers are missing: Megaraid 1.18j, Broadcom 9570
What is the business of your company/organisation? Development + Hosting
Additional comments:
FAI is great and very useful. Many thanks Thomas for your work !!!
From: anonymous
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 12:42:27 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? about 30
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
via network card: yes
type of network card: RealTek onboard 8139C Chipset, PXE boot rom
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: none, at the moment ;-)
What is the business of your company/organisation? Network Security / Developement
Additional comments:
we're using FAI to install our IDS (based on SNORT, but very much
imporoved) on our IDS hardware boxes. In future, i'll try to create a
FAI boot cd to install the whole system, including our own packages,
so that we can ship the IDS also as a cd standalone version. this will
be very tricky because we want the ids to support a variety of
hardware... i'm not sure if i'll be able to successfully complete that
tast, but at least, i'll give it a try ;-)
From: Andrew Agno
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 07:58:01 -0700
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 40 + repeats.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
via network card: yes
type of network card: 3Com 3c59x driver ;
Via-rhine built-in for Via Epia M10000, M9000, M800;
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware?
Yes, although the X detection misses the on-board via driver
-- should be vesa or trident.
What is the business of your company/organisation? AI Research in our group
You can also add some words, how you are using FAI in your company.
Additional comments:
FAI is used for the centibots project, http://www.ai.sri.com/centibots/
Love the product--it's fantastic as a rescue system, too.
From: Jacob Weismann Poulsen jwp@dmi.dk
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 12:08:50 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? around 85 at the moment
Which version of fai are you using? a patched version of 2.3.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? none of them
How do you boot your hosts?
from floppy: yes
from cdrom: yes
via network card:
type of network card:
BOOTP or DHCP: BOOTP (boot-menu as well as install-kernel
are downloaded via TFTP)
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? we use our own customized kernels
What is the business of your company/organisation? weather forecasts and research (http://www.dmi.dk)
From: Arnaud Lauriou lauriou@enst.fr
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:39:16 +0200 (CEST)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 30
Which version of fai are you using? 2.2.3
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? We don't use the FAI kernel,
we use our own kernel.
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: Yes
via network card: Yes (with PXE)
type of network card:
BOOTP or DHCP: DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No, so we decide to use our own kernel.
What is the business of your company/organisation? Educational (engineering school).
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, PARIS, FRANCE
From: Aurélien Gâteau
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 13:58:08 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai?
A dozen right now, we will install a lot more soon, when the product
we developed is officially launched.
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
We use a floppy which boot the system, get an IP from our local DHCP server,
then mount the FAI nfsroot. The FAI server address and the target hostname
are hardcoded into the server through kernel options.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? No problem, works fine
What is the business of your company/organisation? We develop dental aid software.
Additional comments:
FAI is great, this is really the tool we were looking for. Keep up the good work!
From: Ludwig Schwardt schwardt@sun.ac.za
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:37:21 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? About 5 and counting.
Which version of fai are you using?2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5.1
How do you boot your host? From floppy.
I've modified make-fai-bootfloppy quite a bit, added initrd support to
handle my nforce2 network card (I know you don't like this very much,
but there was no other way, plus I really wanted those
motherboards...). I still use DHCP to get network settings
though. I've also added an optional manual override to the network
settings during bootup, for computers whose DHCP settings are
unavailable. For this I had to hack ash/busybox a bit.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? NO
Which drivers are missing: nvnet nForce2 network card.
Unfortunately this is a proprietary NVidia driver with no way of using
it besides via initrd. That's why I am also interested in fai-bootcd,
which would make this problem go away.
Upgrading to Debian and simultaneous hacking of
FAI is a rather slow process at the moment, given that people are still
using their computers...
What is the business of your company/organisation? Engineering research.
Additional comments:
Thanks for a very nice package! The Digital Signal Processing Lab here
at the University of Stellenbosch has been a Linux environment for more
than 7 years now. We've got about 30 machines running various distros,
from Redhat 5 (!) to Debian sarge. They mostly serve as workstations and
for running simulations.
I've helped push the lab towards Debian for ease of maintenance, and FAI
fits right in there. Especially after reading infrastructures.org, I
became convinced that this is a good road to go down. The biggest
obstacle is the fact that the lab hardware is very heterogeneous.
Sitting in South Africa, we mind our budget very carefully, and always
go for the best deals we can get. Unfortunately we therefore don't buy
PXE network cards or 100 identical computers at a time. A lot of legacy
systems remain, combined with very recent and less supported hardware.
The FAI system has made it easier, though, and I am satisfied with the
results so far.
I've been hacking at fai since May this year... I might send you patches
once I've figured out what I've done myself :->
Thanks again for a nice system!
From: Alex Pothaar a.pothaar@rc.rug.nl
Date: 23 Jul 2003 12:03:03 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 40+ workstations and servers
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using? 1.5
How do you boot your host? Intel 100 networkcard using PXE2.0
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes.
What is the business of your company/organisation? University
Rekencentrum Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Additional comments:
We have used FAI for installation of servers for some time now. Recently
we had to design an enviroment for storing and processing of
fMRI-scanner data (neuroimaging project for http://www.rug.nl/bcn).
These systems had to be installed and supported by non-linux staff. The
setup consists of servers, a SAN connection and about 40 workstations.
Installationprocedures are reduced to editing some files (dhcp, classes)
and pressing <F12> (PXE networkboot) for an unattended install. In less
than 15 minutes a Debian GNU/Linux with software and vmware (for a
proprietary OS) is installed, preserving local data.
FAI is great stuff. Keep up the good work!
From: Daniel Myers dmyers@pomona.edu
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:04:55 -0400
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 30+
Additional comments:
I work in the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular
Biology and Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole,MA).
I just thought I'd let you know that I've used FAI with great success
to set up the computing laboratory for the Workshop on Molecular
Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory
(http://newfish.mbl.edu). Using FAI, we were able to get 30+
workstations up and running (starting with an empty room) in the space
of about a day--thanks much for some excellent software.
From: Philipp Grau
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 14:21:39 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai?
We are currently planing the installations of about 40 Linux computer as x-terminals
and about 40 Servers via fai.
Which version of fai you are using? 2.4.1
How do you boot your host?
via network card: x
type of network card: 3com
Do you use bootp or dhcp? dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes
Which drivers are missing: none
From: Joshua Moore
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 16:55:28 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 4 currently. The final
system will be 40+ as soon as netboot is configured.
How do you boot your host? Currently we boot from floppy, then the
information is pulled over by bootptab. At DKFZ, however, we are
part of a large network, so there is also a main bootptab running
over yp-server and dhcp. There are problems due to this. We would
like to use pure netboot as soon as possible.
Do you use bootp or dhcp? bootp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes. We've had to kernel problems.
Additional comments:
My biggest problems, I think, have always been with ssh. Notice above
what I had to do to get it running, and I >STILL< can't ssh in
to a installing machine. Much of this ssh setup should be
self-configuring during "fai-setup".
In general, though I'm thoroughly happy with FAI, I would have to say
that the version 1.3.1 should definitely NOT be in stable. The changes
I had to make there were extreme. Even tracking down the posix problem
in make-fai-nfsroot was a bit extreme. A typical user, simply
shouldn't be expected to go through such lengths.
Nevertheless, I would be very interested in your work for solaris. We
also have +20 Solaris machines, which I could possible tie into the one cluster.
From: Francois CONTAT
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 12:02:45 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? pratically 1 for
the moment, 15 in the future
Which version of fai you are using? 2.4.1
How do you boot your host?
via network card:Y
type of network card:eepro100 (Intel ethernet express pro 100)
Do you use bootp or dhcp? None, fixed-address
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes
Additional comments:
Appears that there is a big problem in the make-fai-bootfloppy
script. The root data is supplied with the nfsroot value, and nfsroot
is left blank. Needed to change manually the script at the lilo and
grub section to add the good nfsroot and root value. I hope this will
be corrected.
Really thank you for this work.
From: Stephane FRITSCH
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 12:03:13 +0100
How many hosts have you installed using fai?
2 installations servers (yes, FAI servers are installed with FAI :-)
we plan to use it to deploy debian linux onto users' desktops,
laptops and devlp servers
Which version of fai you are using? fai:2.4.1 fai-kernels:1.5.3
How do you boot your host?
from floppy: yes, with dhcp and static IP passed as a
parameter to the kernel from the boot menu
via network card: no, not currently but this may change if we decide it
type of network card: eepro100 mainly
Do you use bootp or dhcp? we use dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? no drivers are missing
right now but we haven't tried all our configurations yet.
Additional comments:
No, we use FAI to install classical server and desktop on our
LAN. We want all our machines to share the same settings and
the same package set (well, mostly the same settings).
And of course, we want to do a unattended install of debian/linux
over the network. In the future, we will probably also experiment
cdrom-based FAI installation to configure dedicated server
at customers' place.
From: Niklaus Giger ngiger@mus.ch
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 21:38:55 +0200
How many hosts have you installed using fai? 3
Which version of fai are you using? 2.4.1
Which version of fai-kernels are you using?
How do you boot your host?
from floppy:
via network card: yes
type of network card: built-in
BOOTP or DHCP: dhcp
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? yes
Which drivers are missing: eepro100
What is the business of your company/organisation? I am using this just for my
fun at our home with 2 IntelPCs and 2 Macs. Next week I will setup a neighbours one.
From: Florent DEMURE florent_demure@yahoo.fr
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:17:02 +0100 (CET)
How many hosts have you installed using fai? One, but the install is quite not finished at the moment
Which version of fai you are using? 2.3.1
How do you boot your host? from floppy:
Do you use bootp or dhcp? dhcp, becauses it forces you to reload
manually each time you change something
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware? Yes
Additional comments:
I'd like to thank you one more time, because thanks to
your work, i was given an interesting and useful
project (the Nautibus - computer science area - plans
to use FAI in a close future), even if i spent hours
on errors (Linux newbies are newbies :D)
From: Susan G. Kleinmann
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 12:14:23 -0500
How many host have you installed using fai ? None
Which version of fai you are using ? 2.2.3
How do you boot your host ?
from floppy:
via network card: X
type of network card: 3C905C-TX-M
Do you use bootp or dhcp ? DHCP
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware ? I used my own 2.4.X kernel.
Which drivers are missing: Mostly I was interested in having support
for the I845 chipset.
Additional comments:
I had the following questions about using fai, which eventually led me
to use a manual install rather than an fai install:
1. Do I have to have RARP and NIS working on my server to use fai?
Off-topic: Do RARP and NIS have to be working on my server in order
to execute a remote install, whether or not I am using fai to do it?
2. Why can't debdist be 'unstable'?
3. Isn't it true that _either_ FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP _or_ FAI_BASETGZ should
be defined, but not both? It's not clear whether all the configuration
parameters have to be set, and whether one should specifically not set
some parameters if others are set.
4. I don't have a lot of space left on /usr/local/share, so I would have
liked to change the default value for FAI_CONFIGDIR. But I needed to know
-- how big does this directory have to be?
-- what ownership/permissions does it need?
5. Why does the fai install process require fixed IP addresses? I'd like to
use dhcp without fixed addresses. This problem was really the reason
why I finally decided to do the installation manually.
FWIW, this is my situation/configuration:
Currently, I run a sid system on my workstation. For testing purposes, I
also used debootstrap to install potato and woody on separate partitions.
Recently, I ran out of disk space, and decided to get a new computer
(because the disk controller is old and slow). For this new computer,
I chose not to get yet another floppy and CD-ROM, since I rarely use either.
Therefore, I needed to do a remote install. I needed to build a custom
kernel, since the motherboard (ASUS P4B) was fairly recent and required new
drivers (particularly for the I845 chipset). I often have need for DHCP
here (Windows visitors), so I wanted to set up DHCP on my server anyway.
I was trying to figure out how to use fai in such a way that I could
(a) use my custom kernel,
(b) use my woody partition that was already insalled on my current
(old) workstation, and
(c) use DHCP.
When I finally succeeded in getting DHCP to recognize the NFS-boot server
with the custom kernel I'd built, I went ahead and proceeded with the
roll-my-own install.
From: Matthew Palmer mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 10:30:53 +1000 (EST)
How many host have you installed using fai ? No complete installs. Teething problems.
Which version of fai you are using ? 2.0
How do you boot your host ? floppy disk.
Do you use bootp or dhcp ? DHCP. I have to support Windows clients as
well, and I wanted a single daemon to mess with, rather than several.
Does the default kernel recognize all your hardware ? On every machine tried so far.
Additional comments:
Doesn't work on base2_3.tgz and woody packages. Intend to use Potato
install and an immediate upgrade to Woody on install clients.
What is the business of your company/organisation?
Student-run computing lab at a university.
University of Wollongong, IEEE Student Branch.