Any experience with FAI

[Yves Dorfsman]

Anybody has played, or better use in prod, FAI (Fully Automated Installation,
https://fai-project.org)?

Is it more of an orchestration tool of Config Management, or both?
How does it compare to Terraform, Ansible, Salt etc... ?

--
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[Ted Cabeen]

I used it some time ago. It's essentially the Debian/multi-distro
equivalent to Redhat kickstart or Solaris jumpstart. It manages the
installation of the system from zero. Generally, you'd use FAI to
install a minimal system, then run Puppet/Chef/Ansible etc. to setup
your services.

--Ted

[Paul Graydon]

How did you find it?  Straightforward?

We've had a few customers ask us about getting Debian images on our platform.  I've got tooling etc. built around kickstart, but at some stage need to start thinking about how things are done in the Debian world.

It looks like preseed is the main mechanism by which this is done: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

[Ted Cabeen]

I used it over 10 years ago. It was pretty straight-forward, and met
our needs. However, I probably wouldn't use it today, as the preseed
system is much more robust than it was back then. I expect you can
probably get everything you need done with Debian/Ubuntu preseed files,
and don't need to bother with FAI. I'd start with a basic pre-seed,
then step up to FAI only if preseed doesn't meet your needs.

--Ted

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[Doug Hughes]

I used it once in the distant past. I liked SystemInstaller better, at the time (this was like 15 years ago!). I don't even see that SystemInstaller/SIS exists any longer and FAI seems to still.

I do see a new thing now called Calamares. No experience.

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