Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) – Non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Ubuntu systems

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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-scale infrastructures and clusters.

It's a tool for unattended mass deployment of Linux. You can take one or more virgin PC's, turn on the power, and after a few minutes, the systems are installed, and completely configured to your exact needs, without any interaction necessary.

Main Features

* A tool for automated unattended installation. Lazy system administrators like it.
* Easy-to-use centralized management system for your Linux deployment.
* It's fast. It only takes a few minutes for a complete installation.
* Scalable. FAI users manage their computer infrastructures starting from a few computers up to several thousands of machines.
* Different hardware and different configuration requirements are easy to establish using FAI. You do not need to repeat information that is shared among several machines.
* Using the FAI class concept, you can group a bunch of similar machines.
* Installation targets: desktops, servers, notebooks, Beowulf cluster, rendering or web server farm, Linux laboratory or classroom.
* Linux rollout, mass installation and automated server provisioning are additional topics of FAI.
* FAI is lightweight. No special daemons are running, no database setup is needed. It's architecture independent, since it consists only of shell, Perl and Cfengine scripts.
* Besides initial installations, it is used for daily maintenance, and can set up chroot environments.
* Compared to tools like kickstart or cobbler for Red Hat, autoyast for SUSE or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris, FAI is much more flexible. You can tune every small part of your configuration to your local needs using hooks.

Install FAI in ubuntu 10.10/10.04

You need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the one of the following line

For ubuntu 10.10 Users

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick universe

For ubuntu 10.04 Users

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fai/ubuntu lucid main

Save and exit the file

Update the source list

sudo apt-get update

For quick start install quick start package

sudo apt-get install fai-quickstart

After installation you can check this guide to configure or for ubuntu check this

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