Fully Automatic Installation

From HandWiki
Short description: Rapid installer for Linux distributions

Fully Automated Installation (FAI) is a group of shell and Perl scripts that install and configure a complete Linux distribution quickly on a large number of computers. It's the oldest automated deployment system for Debian.[1]

Automation

FAI allows for installing Debian and Ubuntu distributions. But it also supports CentOS, Rocky Linux and SuSe Linux. In the past it supported Scientific Linux Cern.[2] By default a network installation is done, but it's easy to create an installation ISO for booting from CD or USB stick. [3]

There's a web service for FAI which is called FAI.me, which allows creating customized installation images without setting up your own FAI server. [4] This service also creates cloud images and live images[5]

This service supports Debian and Ubuntu. Debian's cloud team uses FAI for creating their official cloud images. [6]

Similar software exists for Red Hat (Kickstart), SuSE (AutoYaST, YaST and alice), Solaris (Jumpstart) and likely other operating systems.

References

  1. ↑ Hertzog, Raphaël; Mas, Roland. "The Debian Administrator's Handbook". https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/. 
  2. ↑ Lange, Thomas. "CentOS and Scientific Linux Cern installations with FAI". https://lists.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/linux-fai/2011-September/009243.html. 
  3. ↑ "Create a bootable Linux installer with customizations on a USB Flash Drive with Fully Automatic Installer (FAI)". https://medium.com/@kern.cheh/create-a-bootable-linux-installer-with-customizations-on-a-usb-flash-drive-with-fully-automatic-44db2a73cab4. 
  4. ↑ Munro, Andrew. "Build Your Own Automated Debian Install ISO Using FAI". https://andrewmunro.me/posts/2021/09/build-your-own-automated-debian-install-iso-using-fai/. 
  5. ↑ Lange, Thomas. "A web service for building your own customized Debian live image". https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/136-a-web-service-for-building-your-own-customized-debian-live-image/. 
  6. ↑ "Building cloud images". https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/. 



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