[Server-devel] Current Status of the XS Build Process

Holger Levsen holger at layer-acht.org
Thu Aug 2 14:46:31 EDT 2007


Hi,

On Friday 13 July 2007 21:45, Daniel Wyatt Margo wrote:
> Right now, Holger's live CDs do not install a school server image. They
> (are supposed to) install a very normal Fedora image. What Holger has
> attempted to do is automate the installation such that when you boot from
> the live CD, it immediately goes into hard-disk install from a kickstart
> file, with minimal user interaction. 

Right :)

> It would be useful, but it doesn't 
> work, ostensibly due to bugs in anaconda. They are fixed in rawhide, and I
> attempted to to build it with rawhide anaconda, but it wasn't stable. So
> far as I know no one as the office has ever got those live CDs to work.

If they are really fixed in rawhide, cant we just take anaconde from rawhide 
(or just the patches) and be happy?

And, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=243374 is still 
open, so I dont believe its fixed in rawhide :(

> Again, the only thing Holger's live CDs are trying to install is a normal
> Fedora image without OLPC-specific configuration. Configuration comes
> after the install from the configuration manager, FAI. I believe his idea
> was that you could package an FAI configuration repository onto the CD,
> install it, and manage the OLPC configuration from there (so that the
> initial OLPC configuration doesn't require Internet access.) Since
> Holger's live CDs have never worked, I don't know if this works, but it
> sounds reasonable.

It worked manually. (In the beginning of the automation I didnt have a 
kickstart file. Without it, anaconda installed to harddrive just fine and 
then I could ran FAI manually, too.

> Holger, if you could expand + detail on what I've said, that would be
> great.

From a mail I send privatly:

"Normally" FAI is used as a tool for installation and configuration. (Normal 
in this case is what the author and most users do.)

However, since a few years, I mostly use FAI for configuration (and managing, 
as in organizing) and do the installation with the distributions tools. 

So my approach was to create a fedora livecd with the livecd tools, and then 
use the fedora tool for installation: anaconda, which copies the image from 
CD/usbstick to harddrive. The system installed is the minimum set of packages 
every schoolserver needs, with no configuration except for (parts of) the 
partition layout.

Then I would run FAI (so far, on xs, only manually: "fai -N softupdate" - this 
needs the fai-repo defined in /etc/fai/fai.conf but IIRC I did that in my 
livecds), to install more software and deploy or modify configuration files. 
Both based on classes, which can be countries or school-districts or 
whatever.

Having the FAI configuration in git also allows the administrators of a 
machine (whoever that will be), to fork/branch the configuration files FAI 
uses for that machine.

I hope thats short enough and not too long :)

One more thing: because of the image we have in mind when we hear "livecd" I 
decided to call it "live-installer(-cd)".

> http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/livecd-data;a=summary . I've
> http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/rpm-conf;a=summary . I've

Those are not in use anymore but rather the ones quoted two paragraphs further 
down this mail?

On Wednesday 18 July 2007 17:01, Samuel Klein wrote:
> There has been some discussion of a two-step school server setup, with
> an installer that sets up core software on a new disk, and a set of
> additional software that gets built on top of this (which might change
> by region).  the latter may need its own package/project.

That's exactly my approach :)


On Thursday 19 July 2007 23:09, Daniel Wyatt Margo wrote:
> 1.) First, we build a liveCD image of the school server.
> - It has some packages. Information about those packages, and the
> kickstart script that controls the build, can be found at
> http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/livecd-data;a=summary .
> - It has some configuration files. The scripts to package them are at
> http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/xs-config;a=summary , and the
> package is at fedora.laptop.org/olpc-local/i386 . Installing this package
> symlinks the configuration files into the system root -- this is easier
> for development, because it keeps the actual files in a centralized
> location.

I'll look at that tomorrow. 

> - It has some custom scripts. Currently, the only ones I've heard about
> are xs-callhome and init.d/dhcpd . I packaged xs-callhome at
> http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/xs-callhome;a=summary , and the
> package is at fedora.laptop.org . I will package dhcpd later.

Good.

> 4.) Reboot off the hard disk. Skip firstboot config if anaconda presents
> it to you (we'll kill it later.) Congratulations, you've installed the
> school server!

# turn off firstboot for livecd boots
echo "RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO" > /etc/sysconfig/firstboot

In case you havent done that yet :)


regards,
	Holger
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