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Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) of Debian on Sparc

At the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Berne, students had to improve their practical computer networking skills / knowledge. Therefore they had the opportunity to do some labwork on Sparc machines with Debian (v 2.2) installed.

Requirements

The labwork had been divided up into modules which treated different aspects of installation and configuration. Beginning with basic setup of mere networking and routing up to configuration of a DNS for example several important topics were covered. The students didn't have to bother with the initial installation of Debian GNU/Linux itsself: At the beginning of every module they got a preinstalled machine with the necessary packages on it. There were up to 5 concurrent groups and they had to be able to work concurrently in different stages of progess. So, the installation had to be fast, fool-proof and - most important - automatic.

Summarizing the requirements

Using FAI on Sparcs

Doing all the installation manually has never been a topic. Well, that's not quite true: After a glimpse we said "NO WAY!". The installation had to be automatic. No one wants to get mad of manually installing similar configs every two or three weeks! We were quite lucky we found Thomas Lange's FAI, which had reached the version 1.4.2 at that time. See http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ for the most recent version. It was primarily written for i386 machines and some adaptations for the Sparcs had to be done. For example the partitioning of harddisks was done with 'sfdisk' (in the 'gpart' package) originally, which was - and still is (July) - not available for Sparcs. One good thing about the Sparcs is their OpenBoot PROM which allows to get a boot image (boot kernel) from a TFTP-Server. So, there was no need for boot-disks or Boot PROMs for networking cards.

A short description of the installation process (mostly in the user's view)

The Installation Process and its Configuration:
Basically, it's possible to install more than on client at the same time.
To install a workstation (over the net, of course), power it up and get into SUN's OpenBoot PROM by pressing <STOP>+'A' during the boot process.
When the OpenBoot prompt apears ("ok"), enter "boot net" and hit <Return>.
The client then sends a RARP request to get its IP address and the kernel image from the (TFTP-)server. Additional parameters, eg. the location of the NFS root directory, the domain name and others are sent to the clients with the BOOTP protocol. The client machine boots linux with its root on the server.
The details on how to install the client are stored on the server. Changes to the configuration of a client will be made by a collection of 'cfengine', shell an perl scripts, after the Debian packages are installed.
The module configuration which has to be installed on the client is defined by the variable "T175" in the BOOTP daemon's configuration file "/etc/bootptab", (BTW: This file is stored on the server and cannot be changed by clients.)
Example:
 

laba1:ha=0x080020749566:bf=laba1:tc=.failocal:T171="install":T172="verbose ":T175="MODULE1"

Links

http://fai-project.org
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/ls_juenger/lange

Note

The FAI adapation at the IAM was done by Thomas Bodenmann and Patrik Schnellmann in spring 2001. 

July 2001, Patrik Schnellmann

Last modified: 07. November 2011.