FAI - Fully Automatic Installation

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What is FAI? Main Features

• A tool for automated unattended installation. Lazy system administrators like it.
• Remote network installation of different Linux flavors
• Easy-to-use centralized management system for your Linux deployment.
• It's fast. It only takes a few minutes for a complete installation.
• Scalable. FAI users manage their computer infrastructures starting from a few computers up to several thousands of machines.
• Different hardware and different configuration requirements are easy to establish using FAI. You do not need to repeat information that is shared among several machines.
• Using the FAI class concept, you can group a bunch of similar machines.
• Installation targets: desktops, servers, notebooks, Beowulf cluster, rendering or web server farm, Linux laboratory or classroom.
• Linux rollout, mass installation and automated server provisioning are additional topics of FAI.
• FAI is lightweight. No special daemons are running, no database setup is needed. It's architecture independent, since it consists only of shell, Perl and Cfengine scripts.
• Besides initial installations, it is used for daily maintenance, and can set up chroot environments.
• Compared to tools like kickstart or cobbler for Red Hat, autoyast for SUSE or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris, FAI is much more flexible. You can tune every small part of your configuration to your local needs using hooks.
• More technical information in the flyer and poster

FAI Installation Steps

• Network boot via PXE
• Receive configuration data via HTTP, NFS, svn or git
• Run scripts to determine FAI classes and variables
• Partition local hard disks and create RAID, LVM configuration and the file systems
• Install and configure software packages
• Customize OS and software to your local needs
• Reboot freshly installed machine

FAI History

FAI is rock-solid. It's now more than ten years old. FAI was started in 1999 at the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln), when Thomas had to organize an installation of a Linux cluster with one server and 16 clients. Today, FAI is regularly used in varying environments, ranging from a dozen machines up to several thousands machines.