[CentOS-devel] CentOS and Scientific Linux Cern installations with FAI

Mon Sep 19 13:13:51 UTC 2011
lange at fai-project.org <lange at fai-project.org>

I'm very happy to announce, that FAI (Fully automatic Installation)
now can install and configure CentOS and Scientific Linux Cern
(SLC). You can use a Debian FAI server for installing CentOS version 5
and 6 or SLC 5 and 6.

As an example I've also built a FAI multi-distribution CD which
installs those three different Linux distributions with different
configurations. Get this ISO image from

        http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/

This installation is very quick. I've done a CentOS 6.0 installation
(with graphical desktop) in 199 seconds (in a kvm instance on a
quad-core 3.2GHz, hard disk in RAM) and it only needs 490 seconds on
the real hardware when installing from CD.

A short description how to install CentOS or SLC via network
from your FAI server is described in this mail:
  https://lists.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/linux-fai/2011-September/009243.html

Feedback is always welcome. Please send your feedback to the linux-fai 
mailing list
 https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-fai/

Best regards,
   Thomas, in behalf of the FAI team



About FAI:

FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux
systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual
machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large
infrastructures and clusters. 

Compared to kickstart, FAI is more flexible and includes a powerfull
class mechanism to build a configuration from multiple building
blocks. It also includes the features of cobbler.

The project was started in 1999 for the Debian distribution. Later
Ubuntu support was added and some time ago we start adding RPM
support.