FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) for Debian GNU/Linux

FAI is a non interactive system to install a Debian GNU/Linux operating system on a PC cluster. You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on the whole cluster, without any interaction necessary. Thus it is a scalable method for installing and updating a Beowulf cluster or a network of workstations unattended with little effort involved. FAI uses the Debian distribution and a collection of shell- and Perl-scripts for the installation process. Changes to the configuration files of the operating system are made by cfengine, shell and Perl scripts. Using FAI, an unattended and fully automated installation of a Linux cluster which consists of 16 dual Pentium PC s and a Beowulf cluster with 20 AMD 1 GHz nodes was performed.

FAI s target group are system administrators how have to install Debian onto one or even hundreds of computers. Because it is a general purpose installation tool, it can be used for installing a Beowulf cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm or a linux laboratory or a classroom. Also large-scale linux networks with different hardware and different installation requirements are easy to establish using FAI. FAI is an automatic installation tool for Debian GNU/Linux, similar but better than tools for other linux distributions, like kickstart for Red Hat or yast and alice for SuSE or lui from IBM.

FAI is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.