Rolling Out Unattended Debian Installations (Part 1) - page 2

Requirements and Overview

As always, run apt-get update first to update your package lists. Then install all the necessary packages for FAI:

# apt-get install fai fai-kernels debmirror mknbi dhcp3-server bootp tftpd-hpa rsh-server rsync

You'll find out what all of these do as we go along. Next, create a directory to house your mirror. Remember, you'll need a lot of disk space. In this example it is /debmirror, isolated on its own partition, and there are 15 nice plump gigabytes allocated for it.

Now you can download the files. Check the mirror list to find a close download site. Use the mkdebmirror script, located in /usr/share/doc/fai/examples/utils/ to download and build the mirror. mkdebmirror uses debmirror and rsync, and creates the mirror directories. First edit the script to suit your preferences. This example creates a Sid mirror. Note that the original script included with FAI mirrors the security archive. This is not a good idea. For one thing, there is no security archive for Sid. For another, security updates should be downloaded directly from debian.org, so get rid of the debian-security section. It also helpful to add the -v flag to the debmirror commands, so you that can monitor progress. This is a complete example:

#! /bin/sh
# $Id: mkdebmirror,v 1.19 2004/07/08 11:35:44 lange Exp $
# Thomas Lange, lange@informatik.uni-koeln.de, (c) 2001-2004
# create partial debian mirror using command debmirror(1) and rsync

# - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
rsync_disks() {
# get the boot disks
rsync --delete -av $2::debian/dists/$1/main/disks-$arch $destdir/debian/dists/$1/main/
}
# - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
update_from() {
# update local mirror from a host
host=$1
allopt="$debug --passive --getcontents --nosource --arch=$arch --ignore=disks-$arch/"
defopt="$allopt --host=$host --dist=$dist"
echo "------------------ create mirror for debian ------------------"
# add the -v flag for verbosity
debmirror -v $destdir/debian $defopt
echo "------------------ create mirror for debian-non-US ------------------"
debmirror -v $destdir/debian-non-US $defopt -r /debian-non-US -s non-US/main,non-US/contrib,non-US/non-free
}
# - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
# main program
#
# here you have to adjust the hostnames of the mirror and the names of the distributions

debug="$@"
arch=i386
dist=sid destdir=/files/scratch/debmirror
# first sync from a mirror near to you
update_from ftp.us.debian.org
# get installation disk images via rsync
rsync_disks sid ftp.us.debian.org

Save your changes and run your mkdebmirror script:

# /usr/share/doc/fai/examples/utils/mkdebmirror
------------------ create mirror for debian ------------------
Mirroring to /files/scratch/debmirror/debian from ftp://anonymous:ftp.us.debian.org//debian/
Arches: i386
Dists: sid
Sections: main,contrib,non-free,main/debian-installer
Passive mode on.
Attempting to get lock, this might take 2 minutes before it fails.
Get Release files.
[0%] Getting: dists/sid/Release
[0%] Getting: dists/sid/Release.gpg
Get Packages and Sources files and other miscellany
. dists/sid/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz needs fetch
[0%] Getting: dists/sid/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz
...

rsync can be a bit funky; if it fails with an error message, try re-running the script a couple of times before looking for script errors.