faiblog
The FAI.me service has become faster over the past two months. First, the tool fai-mirror can now download all packages in one go (with all their dependencies) instead of downloading one by one. This helped a lot for the Linux Mint ISO because it uses a long list of packages. I've also added a local apt cache (using apt-cacher-ng ), so the network speed does not matter any more in most cases. This…
The FAI.me service has reached another milestone: The 42.000th job was submitted via the web interface since the beginning of this service in 2017. The idea was to provide a simple web interface for end users for creating the configs for the fully automatic installation with only minimal questions and without knowing the syntax of the configuration files. Thanks a lot for using this service and…
New FAI ISOs using FAI 6.4.3 are available. They are using Debian 13 aka trixie, kernel 6.12 and you can now install Rocky Linux 10 and AlmaLinux 10 using these images. There's also a variant for installing Linux Mint 22.2 and Ubuntu 24.04 which includes all packages on the ISO. [1]: https://fai-project.org/fai-cd/
Updates on FAIme service: Linux Mint 22.2 and trixie backports available The FAIme service [1 ] now offers to build customized installation images for Xfce edition of Linux Mint 22.2 'Zara'. For Debian 13 installations, you can select the kernel from backports for the trixie release, which is currently version 6.16. This will support newer hardware. [1]: https://fai-project.org/FAIme
Build your own customized Linux Mint ISO Using the FAIme service [1 ] you can now build your own customized installation ISO for Xfce edition of Linux Mint 22.1 'Xia'. You can select the language, add a list of additional packages, set the username and passwords. In the advanced settings you may add your ssh public key, some grub option and add a postinst script to be executed. Add writable data…
The new FAI release 6.4 comes with some nice new features. It now supports installing the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 22.1 'Xia'. There's now an additional Linux Mint ISO [1 ] which does an unattended Linux Mint installation via FAI and does not need a network connection because all packages are available on the ISO. The package_config configurations now support arbitrary boolean expressions with…
TL;DR It's difficult to find the right Debian image. We have thousands of ISO files and cloud images and we support multiple CPU architectures and several download methods. The directory structure of our main image server is like a maze, and our web pages for downloading are also confusing. Most important facts from this blog post https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ The newest netinst ISO Newest…
The new years starts with a FAI release. FAI 6.2.5 is available and contains many small improvements. A new feature is that the command fai-cd can now create ISOs for the ARM64 architecture. The FAIme service uses the newest FAI version and the Debian most recent point release 12.9. The FAI CD images were also updated. The Debian packages of FAI 6.2.5 are available for Debian stable (aka bookworm)…
A Brief History of FAI, Which Began 25 Years Ago On Dec 21st, 1999 version 1.0 of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) was announced . That was 25 years ago. Some months before, the computer science department of the University of Cologne bought a small HPC cluster with 16 nodes (each with dual CPU Pentium II 400Mhz, 256 MB RAM) and I was too lazy to install those nodes manually. That's why I…
The topic of this posting already tells you that an old Unix guy tells stories about old techniques. I'm a happy NIS (formerly YP) user since 30+ years. I started using it with SunOS 4.0, later using it with Solaris and with Linux since 1999. In the past, a colleague wasn't happyly using NIS+ when he couldn't log in as root after a short time because of some well known bugs and wrong configs. NIS+…